


Miles of Headlights

by fridaysblues (taemin)



Category: EXO (Band), SHINee
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Always a Different Sex, Alternate Universe - Ballet, Always-a-Girl!Jongin, Always-a-Girl!Sehun, F/M, Fake Marriage, Fake/Pretend Relationship
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-05-13
Updated: 2018-03-20
Packaged: 2018-03-30 08:32:49
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 11
Words: 53,811
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3930079
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/taemin/pseuds/fridaysblues
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Jongin asks Taemin for a huge favor, Taemin's happy to do whatever she needs—even if it means confronting a truth he's known deep-down for years: he's in love with his best friend.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

It happens in the middle of the Sunday matinee. Jongin lands wrong after her grand jeté and feels the sharp slice of pain in her ankle, worse than it's ever been. She holds her smile until she's in the wings and then doubles over, grimacing, eyes stinging with embarrassing and unbidden tears.

She hears someone talking to her, distantly, over the swell of the orchestra just past the curtain. A voice at the end of a very long tunnel. The stage manager. "Are you OK? Ms. Kim?"

It's a moment before she's able to stand upright. "I'm fine," she says, taking a tentative step forward. Her ankle buckles underneath her weight and she sits, hard, still gritting her teeth into a smile through her pain. "More or less."

 

— 

 

Taemin's phone doesn't ring until late Monday night. He's sprawled across the couch in his office, an arm draped across his eyes to block out the flickering overhead light while he tries to catch a quick fifteen minute catnap away from everyone. It's another late rehearsal night and he's just started to fantasize about blowing everything off and crawling into bed for a week when his phone starts vibrating deep in the pocket of his sweats. It nearly goes to voicemail before he gets to it.

"Jongin?" He cringes at the way the muscles in his calves start to pull, already threatening to quit cooperating with him if he keeps going tonight. He works his hand in between his body and the back of the couch and presses gingerly at the burgeoning ache, trying to massage it away. "You're not calling me to get bailed out of jail, are you? Because I'm a little short on cash this week, so you'll have to spend the night until I can borrow money from someone else."

"Hey, asshole," she says, laughter in her voice. There's always that lilt to her tone when she's talking to Taemin—somewhere between teasing and genuinely pleased to hear from him. "If you're too busy to answer the phone for your best friend, you could've just let it go to voicemail."

"Look—some of us have to work for a living," he mumbles, rolling over onto his stomach. His hand flops bonelessly on the floor. The fabric of the couch is scratchy against his cheek and smells like too much Febreze or whatever they've been using to deodorize the soft surfaces in this building. He tries not to think about all the people who have napped—or fucked—on this couch. He's even taken advantage of it a few times, but not lately.

On the other end of the line, Jongin chuckles in her low, throaty alto and starts to say something. There's a crackling noise in the background that drowns out her voice for a moment. The tinny, thin sound of a stereo, distorted by a cell phone's receiver. Taemin crushes the phone closer into his ear to catch what she's saying. "—sounds more like you're sleeping on the job."

"Like you've never been caught doing that."

"These kids wearing you out? You're closer to thirty than twenty these days, Taemin, maybe it's time to think about retirement.”

“As much as I'm loving the abuse, did you actually need anything?" He sits up and scrubs at his eyes until the blurriness subsides.

"I need a reason to call, now? I can't just call to see how you're doing?" Jongin asks, tone far too casually innocent to be sincere.

"At—" Taemin breaks off, looks at the clock mounted on the wall. "—eleven at night?" His shoulders sag. He's got another few hours of this before he can go home.

"It's still the afternoon here."

Taemin pauses, wheels turning as he tries to do the math in his head. "Shouldn't you be at the theatre?"

"We're dark on Mondays." He can't see her to know for certain, but he's pretty sure she's shrugging at him on the other end of the line, face blank, winding a strand of her hair around her finger. Ah, right. Union rules. A concept completely unfamiliar in the pop music industry. Taemin works fourteen hours a day, every day, exhaustion and illness be damned, always pushing towards the next promotion cycle, the next album release, the next concert tour. And he's got it relatively easy, considering he's just the choreographer.

"Must be nice to get a day off," he says, trying for sarcastic and probably coming off as wistful instead.

"More than a day," she says, clearing her throat. "That's actually why I called. Do you think—are you around tomorrow night? I need a favor."

"What does 'around' mean?"

"I'm coming back into town. Need someone to come pick me up and I nominated you for the honor." Something changes—the way her voice tightens, sounding so cautious, like she means to say something else. "So, can you?"

Taemin watches his reflection in the mirror across the room. Hair cowlicked, skin sallow and shiny with oil. He swallows. He's got another one of those fourteen hour days tomorrow, and that's if he's lucky and everyone else has done their jobs, which seems incredibly unlikely. The new group SHINE Entertainment's trying to debut next month is—well, they're not ready. Not even close. 

Still. He hasn't seen Jongin since his birthday last year. August seems a lifetime ago. She's never in town for very long anymore. The company she's with in London keeps her busy enough, and before that it was the endless months of touring, then school. So really, he can't say anything but yes. 

It doesn't occur to Taemin until after he hangs up the phone that it's only early April. Jongin's season doesn't end until May.

 

—

 

She appears at the arrivals gate after the rest of the passengers from her flight have come through, a face mask looped over her ears, a cap pulled down over her hair. She's got a gym bag slung over one shoulder. She looks great—tired, admittedly, but great. The line of her body is long and lean, one slender curve of sinew and bone from head to toe, like she's just stepped out of a Degas painting, if Degas had been painting Korean ballerinas. The crowd parts to allow her through and stands back, a little awestruck by her presence, even if most of them don’t have a clue who she is. She's got a handful of fans here, but not many. Taemin wonders if they know why she's back in the country. He nearly asks, but thinks better of it.

At the baggage carousel, he notices the reluctant shuffle in her gait, the subtle way she shifts her weight to favor her left leg. She pulls her mask off one ear, revealing that brilliant grin of hers, toothy and white, and waves.

"I wasn't sure if you'd actually show."

Jongin offers her cheek to Taemin, who kisses it. "How was the flight?" he asks. _How are you? Have you been eating well? Are you okay? Why are you home?_ he doesn't say. He takes her bag and falls in step beside her.

"Oh, you know," she says, adjusting the brim of her military cap and pulling it down over her eyes a little more. The crowd mostly disperses, finally, after she's waved hello and posed for a couple pictures. "Flying European airlines means I get my fill of weird pastries and cheeses. I'd stab someone for some decent fried chicken right now."

"Is this the new diet they've got you on?" he teases, pinching her arm. She yelps and pulls it away from him, rubbing the skin until it goes pink from the friction.

"Fuck the diet," she says with feeling. "I'm on vacation."

Taemin drives a BMW, but it's an old one—it was old when he got it, back when he was first hired at SE, when he just needed something that didn’t look like he was borrowing his mom’s old junker. In retrospect, he should have looked for something more like his mother would drive instead because this thing is a real piece of shit. Jongin'd teased him for being too good for the subway, now. Considering the number of times he has to take the subway anyway because the car's got to go back into the shop, he's not quite sure he's graduated to full-blown transportation snob just yet. The gear box groans ominously when he shifts it into first gear and pulls out of the parking space.

"So," he says, after they pull out of Incheon's short term parking lot and Jongin still hasn't said anything. "You got fired, right? That's why you're here in the middle of the week?"

She whips around to look at him, aghast. "Taemin."

"You could've told me. I wouldn't have made fun of you. Too much, anyway—did you sleep through a performance? Did you—"

"I didn't get fired," she says, hands tightening on the purse in her lap. "I—uh—had to take a leave of absence." Taemin waits, knowing Jongin can never keep a secret from him for too long. And sure enough, in her next breath: "I tore a ligament in my ankle," she admits finally, tugging up the ankle of her jeans to reveal a thick, black brace, velcroed tightly halfway up her calf.

"Shit," Taemin murmurs, suddenly serious, reaching out to slip his hand over her knee. He squeezes it comfortingly. So this is why she sounded so glum on the phone. "Again?"

"Worse this time," she admits. She turns to look out of the window and the streetlight cuts hazy and yellow across her face. Her lips purse.

"How much worse?" he asks hesitantly, not sure if he really wants to hear the answer. She's already had one of these, a minor one about three years ago now. After a few months of rest and very light activity she'd been declared good as new. She'd been dancing on it pretty consistently ever since with no trouble. Or at least, as far as Taemin knows. He doesn't speak to her every day, and she usually leaves out the mundane updates on her aches and pains because he's got them too—they all do. The price you pay to dance every day.

She shakes her head curtly and tosses a vague, "Bad," at him. He doesn't push it any further.

"I called Baekhyun for you," Taemin says instead. "They're waiting for us, if you're up for a drink. Or I can take you home."

Jongin keeps looking out the window, eyes trained on the buildings whizzing by. "Hmm?" she says, finally. A million miles away.

"Do you want to see everyone and drink some beer," Taemin says slowly, "or do you want to go home and sleep? It's your choice." He looks at her, smiling slyly. "I mean it's okay, you're not as young as you used to be. I hear beauty sleep becomes more important as a woman ages—"

"Fuck you, Taemin," Jongin laughs, snapping back to attention to punch him in the side. He yanks the wheel playfully, just enough that the car swerves crazily in the lane and then straightens out again.

"Careful! Don't hit the driver," he says. "You'll kill us both."

"I'm not that lucky," she says. "Fine. One beer. Since you've already announced my homecoming to everyone in the city."

"It's rude to keep your people waiting," Taemin agrees, and flicks on his turn signal to change lanes.

 

—

 

Jongin's people are mostly Taemin's people these days. She's been gone so long that her group of friends has adopted him as a way of staying in touch with her. Baekhyun and Kyungsoo, both vocal coaches who work at SE with Taemin. Sehun, a tall, poker-faced girl who'd gone to school with Jongin and now dances with the Korean National Ballet. Kyungsoo's got his boyfriend Chanyeol in tow tonight, too. The height difference between Kyungsoo's compact stature and Chanyeol's lanky beanpole body never fails to make Taemin laugh. They're an odd couple, physically, but he's never seen a duo as in sync as Kyungsoo and Chanyeol—except, perhaps, for him and Jongin. 

Before they go in, Jongin asks Taemin to keep quiet about her ankle. 

"I'm not sure what I'm going to do about it yet. I don't want them to worry," she says, twisting the leg of her jeans until the brace underneath is invisible. Taemin understands—this one could stall out her career, or worse, end it completely, and although they mean well, Jongin's friends tend to fuss over her when she's injured, which sometimes feels more like patronizing than concern to a dancer used to pushing through the pain.

Taemin stands aside and lets Jongin slide into the booth next to Baekhyun before he sits down himself. If anyone notices stiffness in the way Jongin moves, or the split-second grimace before her face relaxes, they don't say anything about it.

"You didn't tell us you were coming home," Baekhyun coos, pulling Jongin in for a ferocious hug. "We would have met you at the airport with banners! How am I supposed to run your fansite if I don't have any pictures of you in your airport fashion?"

"Exactly why I didn't tell you," Jongin says, deadpan. "You're an embarrassment, Baekhyun."

"We keep telling him that," Sehun says, eyes trained on her cellphone, thumbs flying over the screen wildly as she texts someone—her new boyfriend, probably, some martial artist guy from China she'd met while on tour with the KNB. Jongin'd told Taemin about it last fall but he's never met the guy so he hasn't bothered committing much about him to memory.

Kyungsoo swats Baekhyun away from Jongin. "Stop monopolizing her," he says crossly, and Baekhyun pulls faces at Kyungsoo when he leans over Baekhyun's lap to hug Jongin. Chanyeol's too far away, despite the impressive length of his arms, and waves to her instead.

"So," Baekhyun says after Chanyeol's returned with a round of drinks for everyone. "What brings you back to little old Seoul? Missed me that much?"

Jongin laughs awkwardly. Taemin's not sure anyone else notices—Sehun's eyes flick up at the sound but then they're back on her phone just as quickly. 

"Yeah, that's it," she says, taking a long pull from her bottle of Hite. "I have a family thing."

"Your company's okay with you leaving in the middle of the week?" Sehun asks, not unkindly.

"That's what happens when you're the principal," Baekhyun says impressively, puffing his chest out a little bit as though Jongin's accomplishments were his own. 

"Stop," Jongin says. "My understudy's very good. I haven't missed a show yet, so she hasn't had a chance to go on at all. The director agreed it would be alright to give her that chance."

"What's going on? Is everything okay at home?" Kyungsoo asks.

"I—yeah," she says, sounding very unsure. "I'm not ready to tell you guys yet." This gets everyone's attention. She puts her hands up to stop them before the barrage of questions begins. "I'm not going to keep you in the dark for too long. All will be revealed. Friday."

"Gonna hold you to that," Baekhyun says, pointing the neck of his bottle at her. "Not fair to keep secrets from your nearest and dearest."

"Please," Sehun scoffs, and a knowing smile curves her lips. "Taemin obviously knows what's going on. Look at him."

Taemin suddenly finds himself the sole focus of five pairs of eyes. Jongin's turned her shoulders to him, her eyes pleading: _don't._ He shrugs.

"I don't know what's going on." It's half-true, at least. He does know that she's hurt, but she hasn't clued him in to what she's thinking. There are only a few options for an injury like this, and it's ultimately her call what she chooses to do. So, he'll know as soon as she decides. 

"Bullshit," Chanyeol says, laughing. He points across the table at Taemin, who keeps looking nervously at Jongin, and then down at the table. "Look at his face."

"You're a terrible liar," Kyungsoo agrees. 

Jongin deflects with another shrug and a knowing smile, peering into her beer bottle. Finding it empty, she steals Taemin's. He catches her just as she's pressed it to her lips and tipped it back, throat pulsing with each swallow.

"Jesus," Baekhyun says, unable to keep the admiration out of his tone. "I could have sworn you were a young lady. We've got pictures of you in a pink tutu and it's all a lie." He taps his chin thoughtfully. "I should sell these pictures. I'd make a fortune."

"Please. I'm sure Taemin's got some really incriminating ones," Sehun says. "Growing up together the way they did? He could retire with the pictures he's got stashed of the Nation's Fairy."

"How did you know? That was my ten-year plan," Taemin says, managing to keep a completely straight face even as Jongin dissolves into helpless laughter, slapping at his arm hard enough to bruise.

 

— 

 

Jongin asks to be taken to her parents' place in Dobong, one of those high rise apartments just off the river. Taemin drums his fingers on the wheel as he drives, watching the streetlights illuminate Jongin's clasped hands, folded tightly in her lap.

"What are you thinking about?" he asks finally, voice a little hoarse from speaking up to be heard over the impressive volume of the smoky bar, from the cigarette he and Jongin had split before leaving. 

"Hmm?" She looks at him, blinking slowly. "Nothing." She yawns. "Thank you for coming to get me, Taemin," she says, drowsily petting his cheek with the back of her fingers. "You're a very good friend."

"I'm the best friend," he reminds her. "And anyway, you'd do the same for me."

"I know," she says, and fails to stifle another yawn. "I'd do anything."

"Me too," Taemin says. One hand pulls off the wheel to cover hers. " Are you going to be okay? I'm worried about your ankle."

"I am too," she admits. "It's killing me right now. But I've got an appointment tomorrow, I guess we'll know more about my options then."

"Do you need me to—"

"No," she says quickly. "I'm going to go alone. But thank you." 

"If you change your mind, or get stranded—"

"Taemin," she says impatiently, withdrawing her hand to smack his shoulder. "How are the children going to know which direction to thrust their hips if you're not there to tell them?"

He laughs. "Meet me for dinner after, at least? You can tell me all about it. In exchange, I can offer you stories about trainees being stupid. I have no shortage of those."

"Yeah," she says, sounding distracted again, and starts chewing on her lower lip the way she does every time she's anxious about something. Taemin settles back and lets her breathe after that. With something this big on her mind, it makes sense she's more distracted than she usually is, and considering she's been traveling all day, he's surprised she's even awake right now. He can sympathize with how worried she must be feeling—mercifully, he's never been injured this badly, but it's the one thing every dancer lives in fear of every time they get out on the floor, every time they cross the street or go to the grocery store, every time they step out of the bathtub onto a wet tiled floor instead of the bath mat and sway dangerously for just a second before their balance saves them. The career-ender. It's bad enough when it happens to a colleague but this is Jongin, his best friend, so it almost feels worse than having to go through it himself because there's nothing he can do for her. All he can do is hope for the best and keep his fingers crossed the doctor's able to do something to keep her dancing for just a little longer.


	2. Chapter 2

He leaves work early the next day in order to be on time for his dinner with Jongin, handing over the reins to his assistant right in the middle of rehearsal. The assistant seems a little murderous when he catches Taemin shrugging on a light jacket and retrieving his keys from the office. Taemin fights traffic downtown but with some creative (and sometimes downright illegal) maneuvering, he manages to arrive in Dobong promptly at eight. In some weird act of chivalrous guilt, he actually gets out of the car and holds the passenger side door open for Jongin.

"I'm not going to tip you," she warns, wagging her finger in his face. She's still moving slowly, wearing a long dress this time to hide the brace. Taemin offers his hand anyway and she accepts. "You know," she says, gathering her skirt in the car after her to allow Taemin to shut the door. "If you had a nicer car, maybe I wouldn't need the assistance."

"Don't listen to her, girl," he says, patting the dashboard of the car affectionately even as the gearbox makes an ominous grinding noise. "You and me. Together forever."

She laughs. "So where are you taking me? I need a drink or twelve."

"Rough day?" He turns down the radio a few clicks. "What did the doctor say?"

"Well, it's definitely torn." She runs her hand down her calf and hikes up the hem of her skirt to reveal the brace again. Taemin watches her out of the corner of the eye as she fiddles with the velcro. 

"Are they recommending surgery?"

"He said that's definitely an option." She points the toe of her good foot, rolls her ankle, then relaxes it again. "The doctor said I'm a candidate for PRP injections."

Taemin's posture eases up a little. If they're recommending the platelet-rich plasma injections, that means they're optimistic her body can heal the tear on its own without cutting into anything. "That's good, then."

"Means I'm out for the rest of the season."

"Have you talked to your director about it? This kind of thing happens all the time." Taemin pulls to a stop at a red light behind a dented blue Kia that looks like it's seen better days. "That's why they cast understudies."

She shrugs and sticks her thumb between her teeth. Bites it. She's worrying again.

"Jongin?" Taemin pushes gently. The light's still red. He turns to look at her. "You did call your director today, didn't you? What did he say?"

"Yeah," she says finally. "I called him. I—really didn't know what to say, though."

"You say you need some time off to recover from your injury."

"We've got a crop of new dancers in," she says suddenly, sitting forward, face in her hands. She speaks through her fingers. "There's this one—girl from New York. She's incredible."

"Jongin?"

"Like, really incredible. I'm terrified. She's only twenty-one."

"Look at you," he says softly. He hasn't seen her this doubtful of her own abilities since high school. "When did you get so scared of a little competition?"

"Probably around the same time I stopped being the youngest one in the company."

"Who cares? You're the principal, Jongin. You're incredible too, you know."

"Not like this, I'm not," she says. "If I told them I was injured badly enough to need treatment, they're always going to remember the months I took off. Everyone will be assessing me based on how I danced before. You know how it is—the minute they know there's been an injury they start looking for weakness. It'll be 'good, for being post-surgery'. It'll be all anyone talks about."

"You haven't told them?" Taemin's shocked. "Jongin. Why can't you just tell them? This stuff happens to dancers all the time. People can go on and get better and dance just as well as they did before."

"But we don't know if I will, yet."

Taemin sighs. "What are you going to do?

"I'm going to dance again," she says, sounding more confident than she has the entire conversation. 

"Good. You're too talented not to. But you can't keep it a secret forever. They're going to notice how long it takes you to come back from Seoul."

Now she's looking nervous again. "Not if I've already given them a plausible excuse," she says, voice soft.

"Plausible?" Taemin snorts. "I don't understand, Jongin. What could you possibly tell them? A death in the family?"

"I told the company I was coming home to get married."

The traffic light finally goes green. Taemin sits there for a moment, stunned, even as the cars behind him start to lean on their horns, impatient and angry with the silver BMW blocking their way.

"Taemin," Jongin admonishes, pointing at the road. "Drive. It's green."

"Married?" Taemin gapes, taking his foot off the brake. The car rolls through the intersection. "You? To who?" He didn't even know she'd been seeing anyone, and he feels a fleeting stab of hurt in his chest at the thought that she'd been keeping a secret like that from him. Except—

"To you," she says, folding her hands in her lap. "If you'll have me."

He puts his foot back on the brake. Hard. Both Taemin and Jongin fly forward in their seats enough that the seatbelts have to catch them before they go through the windshield. A chorus of angry horns rings out from behind them.

Jongin clutches at her tightened seatbelt, looking pained. "Jesus, Taemin, if you're going to freak out, please pull over."

He manages to flick on the indicator and pull up to the curb. Once the handbrake's engaged and they're safely parked, he turns to stare at her, eyes bugged with shock.

"You're insane," he says. "If this is your idea of a practical joke—"

"You said you'd do anything, right?" She places her hand on his forearm and squeezes it. He can tell by the look on her face that she's dead serious. The way her mouth is set in a line like that, eyes narrowed and focused so intensely on Taemin that he can actually feel the weight of her stare. She's serious, alright. As a heart attack.

"Jongin. I—don't even know what to say—"

"It's not—it doesn't have to be real or permanent. But if it looks like I'm taking time off for a personal matter like this, then maybe no one will find out about my ankle."

He looks back out the windshield, listening to the steady tic-tic-tic of the indicator. A few cars drive past.

"I asked them to let me break the news myself. On Friday. That's—that's when I'm going to tell everyone. And if you won't, that's okay—really, Taemin, don't feel like you have to. I can ask Baekhyun." Her hand coasts up his sleeve and settles on his wrist. "I know this is crazy—but it's my career, and I just—you were my first choice, because you're my best friend and I trust you more than anyone."

Taemin's silent for a long time, considering this. "Baekhyun?" he manages after a pause, voice cracking on it. "You'd ask _Baekhyun_ to be your fake husband if I said no?"

She laughs. "Who else?"

"Anyone else. Literally anyone else in the world, Jongin." And then, again: "Jongin." He sighs, suddenly serious. This is huge. The implications of this—for her career, if they get caught in this lie. For his, too, maybe, although he's not the one in the newspapers. He's not the one with an international reputation to uphold. 

"I'm sorry," she says, and her hand jerks away from his. "I shouldn't have asked. I know it puts you in a difficult spot. I just thought that maybe—"

"It's fine," Taemin says quickly, and catches at her fingers, holding them until she stops trying to pull back. "I understand why you're doing this. If it's what you need to do, then yeah. I'll marry you."

Relief floods her face, instant and overwhelming. She looks like she's on the brink of tears, which wouldn't be a surprise. She's always been a crybaby, ever since they were children. "Taemin, I'll owe you a million favors. My first born."

"Our first born," Taemin corrects, winking. She slaps his chest, hiccuping with dry sobs.

"You idiot. It's just pretend." She hugs him. Her arms are warm and secure around his neck. "Thank you," she whispers. "You're a lifesaver."

 

—

 

They hash out the plans at dinner. Somewhere around the second bottle of soju, a photographer appears out of nowhere and snaps a picture of Jongin. She's a little glassy-eyed but her grin isn't totally sloppy from the alcohol yet. She waves at him with both hands, and the little man scuttles away.

"Convenient," Taemin says, tipping back another shot. "You hire him to do that? To sell our cover story?"

"No, but good thinking," she says. "Should I tweet out my schedule for the rest of the week and see if we get any company on our dates?"

Taemin holds up the bottle and shakes it, then points it at Jongin's empty glass. She nudges it across the table with her fingertips and continues what she'd been saying before they'd been interrupted.

"It'd be ideal if we could get away without telling anyone, but I don't think there's a way to get it past my parents. Especially after."

"After?"

"When I go back to London and you don't come with me, I mean," Jongin says. "Our separation and eventual divorce."

He chuckles, poking at the food on his plate with his chopsticks. "You'd really leave me? I hope I get half of your things in this arrangement."

"Over my dead body," she says. 

"So that's not a 'no'."

"Besides," she continues, her tone completely reasonable despite the absurdity of the entire situation. Here she is, Taemin's best friend since before he could walk, discussing a publicity stunt marriage with him for the sake of hiding her physical therapy. And she's not even laughing about it. Taemin's still having a hard time believing this isn't a weird dream he'll wake up from. "If we tell our parents that we're getting married in a week and a half, completely out of the blue, they're going to have a lot of questions. They'll probably suspect you got me pregnant."

"That can be arranged," Taemin jokes, mustering a sleazy wink, complete with finger guns. 

She actually lunges across the table to punch him in the stomach, her elbows knocking the plates of food as she sinks her knuckles right into his solar plexus. He fights her off with a loud oof, laughing at the serious expression on her face. 

"Jongin, Jongin, the photographer could still be here. You don't want to make the papers for spousal abuse. People will talk."

She flounces back to her seat, skirt billowing out behind her. "You," she huffs, "are the worst person I know."

"Sweetheart," Taemin drawls, "you don't mean that." He leans forward on his elbows, batting his eyelashes at her until her scowl breaks and she can't stop the smile from creeping back into the corners of her mouth. 

 

— 

 

They split another cigarette later, walking back to the car. She's a little more unstable on her feet than she was before, a combination of fatigue and alcohol. Taemin circles an arm around her waist and holds her steady. She leans into him—stiffly, at first, until she seems to remember that it's okay if someone happens to see them and relaxes into his side a little. 

"You think they're going to be mad at us? When they find out?" Jongin asks. They'd decided to withhold information from everyone except those deemed absolutely necessary for the plan to succeed. The wider the circle, the higher the risk of someone slipping up in front of the wrong person, and Taemin respects Jongin's need for absolute discretion. "Baekhyun and Kyungsoo and Sehun, I mean." She holds out her hand, gesturing for the cigarette. He cranes his head forward and lets her take it from between his lips.

"Maybe, maybe not." The tip of the cigarette glows orange for a moment with her next breath. He shrugs, noticing her downcast eyes. "We're all in this life together. It's not like they don't know what the industry's like. What fans are like."

She scoffs, her breath hazy with grey wisps of smoke. "I'm not doing it to hide anything from my fans, though—I'm not an idol, Taemin. Nobody pays attention to me like that."

"I know. Still. The critics following your career—it's not like they give you much of a choice sometimes."

"I'm really sorry for doing this to you."

"You haven't done anything yet," he points out, and then sobers up. "Besides. This is an excuse to spend as much time as I want with my best friend. You've been living out of the country for years. I couldn't be happier."

Her head thunks against his shoulder gently. He's barely her height—probably a little bit shorter than her, in fact, if he really cares to admit it, especially on the occasions she wears high heels. He strokes her hair, bends in and kisses her temple, even though anyone could be watching.

"It'll be okay," he says, and realizes that he means it.

 

—

 

By Friday morning the final arrangements are all in place. They had dinner with both sets of parents last night and laid out the entire plan. Taemin's mother seems the most skeptical about what they're doing, but even she agrees that if it's what's best for Jongin's career, and Taemin doesn't mind, then they have her blessing.

Taemin goes out to the jewelers that morning and picks out a set of silver rings. Jongin wasn't expecting this part. This was his surprise, his way of contributing to the plan, of playing along. If she wanted people to believe they were going to get married, then he was going to do everything in his power to sell it. It's like playing any other role—he just has to commit, and then it's like he really is Jongin's fiancé, wiping the fingerprints from the shiny bands, opening and closing the clamshell box in his pocket all day after he picks them up, trying to calm his nerves. 

Which is stupid, he realizes, and laughs at himself for being such an idiot. He's taking this whole thing way too seriously. This isn't a real marriage. There's nothing to be nervous about. Everything's going to be fine.

— 

 

The looks on everyone's faces, Taemin decides, is the best part of this whole ruse so far. The whole gang's there. Baekhyun's even brought Jongdae along this time. Jongdae is Baekhyun's roommate and one of the senior solo artists at SE. He spends a lot of time working with Baekhyun and Kyungsoo and has a vague acquaintance with Taemin and Jongin, enough that he's thrilled to see her and even wants to talk to her about the rumors he's heard about the repertoire for London's next season. Kyungsoo chokes on an ice cube and Chanyeol has to pound on his back until he stops coughing. Sehun actually squeals and leaps across the table to hug Jongin, her bony elbows clubbing Taemin in the face as he tries to dive out of the way and fails, spectacularly.

"You didn't even tell us," Baekhyun accuses. "You sneaky, sneaky bastards. How long have you been planning this?"

"It's so soon, too," Sehun says, narrowing her eyes at Jongin. "You're really only giving us a week to prepare for this? Where am I supposed to find a dress on such short notice?"

"It's going to be very small," Jongin says, not quite meeting everyone's eyes. "Just close friends and family. I didn't want it to be anything big or fancy."

"Gifts! What am I supposed to do about a gift?" Baekhyun demands. "What do you need? Are you moving in together? Are you staying in Korea? I have so many questions."

"Baekhyun, calm down," Jongdae says, patting Baekhyun's shoulder. "They're probably going to London, right? They can't take anything big with them."

Taemin suddenly feels very strange. He hadn't considered this part—the fact that his coworkers, his friends, were now expecting him to pack up his career and move across the world for hers. What was he going to say? He couldn't actually do that—for one, Jongin needs to stay in the city. Her doctor is here. For two—it's not even real. Not that they know that, of course. It starts to register that it's going to be more difficult than he thought to keep this little charade of theirs going.

"I—uh. Well," he starts. "You see, we—uh."

"I'm staying here for now," Jongin says smoothly, speaking over Taemin with the practiced ease of someone who'd been anticipating the question. "No gifts, we're both fine."

"I didn't even know you two were together," Kyungsoo says. "I mean, I always suspected, but you never said anything."

Taemin knows when to step up his act. He leans over and plants a big, wet kiss on Jongin's cheek. "Well, you know how our Jongin is. She bullied me into it."

Jongin kicks him under the table with her bad ankle and immediately grimaces with pain. Taemin notices the regret and deflects with a wide gesture at Jongdae and something about his latest single, suggesting that maybe Jongdae could sing for them at the reception.

Jongin leans into Taemin's shoulders, pretending to be affectionate as she whispers, "Oh, my fucking god, that hurts so much."

"Hey. Get a room, you two," Sehun snaps, grinning. "Taemin. You dog. I said he knew something—didn't I tell you guys? I'm psychic. Why don't you ever listen to me?"

"I did," Chanyeol volunteers immediately. "I could tell something was up." He turns to them. "It's okay. It's too hard to hide when you're in love. You shouldn't do that anymore."

"Agreed," Kyungsoo says, raising his bottle. "A toast."

Everyone echoes him, arms lifted in the air. Glasses clink. Sehun demands to take a picture of everyone with the happy couple and waves over the waiter. "Make sure everyone looks good," she demands, flustering the poor guy before he's even had the chance to focus the screen. 

"Kiss?" Baekhyun asks from somewhere above Taemin's head. "One where they're kissing?"

"I don't know," Jongin says slowly. Taemin looks at her, eyes flicking down to her mouth just as she licks her lips.

"It's fine," he murmurs, thumb tracing the pulse in her wrist, drawing her into his space. "Just follow me, okay."

"You think I've never kissed anyone before?" she mumbles, eyes wide, challenging him. He can tell she wants to hit him. He bridges the gap before she can say anything else, mouth firmly on hers, catching her words with a soft gasp. Her hand comes up of its own volition to hold his jaw. It feels like an eternity passes before the flash illuminates the entire group. Taemin sees the light dance in her eyelashes, and then they flutter open. Jongin looks at him and pulls back, smiling shyly. He reaches out, acting on impulse, and tucks a strand of hair behind her ear.

"You guys are so cute," Sehun says, thrusting the phone in front of their faces for their inspection and approval. "It's a little disgusting. Look at yourselves." 

Taemin looks at the pictures, grainy and dark from the restaurant's dim lighting. Still, he can see the way his eyes are open wide, staring right at her, even mid-kiss. Oops. He hadn't thought about the public displays of affection, either, and mentally makes a note to relax (and keep his eyes closed next time!) because they're never going to get away with it if it doesn't look natural. 

"Not bad," he whispers to Jongin as the others file away to cram back into their booth. She smiles at him, looking guilty but flushed with excitement.

"This might just work," she breathes. "I think they bought it."


	3. Chapter 3

The wedding is scheduled for the following Saturday; Jongin's procedure, the Monday after that. Between now and then, they've got a lot of preparations to make. Taemin's phone keeps chiming so many times while he's running rehearsal that he actually has to turn it on silent and leave it back in his office to avoid the temptation of checking it. When he finally gets a minute to himself, he's got half a dozen matter-of-fact updates from his mother: _bought the flowers. we found shoes that will fit with the brace. jongin's sister is allowing us to use her restaurant._ He’s got twenty-six messages from Jongin, all increasingly frantic keysmashes or entire rows of exclamation points filling the screen. A string of emojis: cake—question mark—microphone—question mark—skull—double exclamation point.

So, she’s a little stressed, trying to get this finished all at once. Taemin’d rather be here in the practice room watching trainees hack through footwork for hours on end than out at the shops, _with his mother_ , nailing down the details to make Saturday perfect.

He opens the last one and is momentarily taken aback at the shot of her in a wedding dress, posing in front of a mirror with a cheesy grin and a peace sign. _One fake bride coming right up!! ^^_ she writes. 

He saves it and sets it as his wallpaper.

"A twenty-four hour honeymoon?" Taemin asks, pulling a face at her when she outlines the weekend for him. "That's hardly time to do anything at all."

"What did you have in mind?" she asks, and then punches him in the arm when he wiggles his eyebrows. "Oh, fuck you, Taemin."

"Since you asked nicely." He catches her hand this time, laughing helplessly. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm kidding. You sure you’ll be alright next week?"

"Sure, no problem. They’re going to give me crutches."

Taemin knew it was too much to hope for the entire week, especially on short notice. They’ve got too much to get done this week. They’re shooting the teasers for _Y KNOT_ on Tuesday and then their music video on Wednesday, and there’s a dress rehearsal for the debut showcase on Thursday. He’s barely able to secure the Monday off, and he’s only able to do that after he practically gets on his knees and begs his assistant to handle the morning’s rehearsal. 

The timing really couldn’t be worse for everyone. Jongin’s going to need help getting around after the procedure, and Taemin doesn’t want to leave her stranded all day, but he’ll be out of a job if he insists on any more vacation time right now.

"As long as you don’t miss me too much," he warns, and ducks away from her fist again when, predictably, it comes swinging.

—

 

News of the surprise wedding hits the papers later that week. Taemin catches a glimpse of the headline waiting in the queue at Starbucks. _Nation's Fairy Comes Home For Love._ Acting on an impulse, he buys every copy of it and brings the armful back for Jongin, setting them down on her parents’ kitchen table with a loud smack.

"I know," she groans when she sees them, poking at the stack with a resigned look on her face. It topples over and papers skid everywhere onto the floor. Her leg’s propped up again on another chair, so she doesn’t bother to retrieve them. "It wasn't supposed to be a big deal. I was expecting a mention in the Arts & Entertainment section, if anything."

"You're way too big time for that," Taemin teases, skimming the page for his name. He sees it, along with a tiny pixellated headshot from about four years ago that they must have pulled from SE's webpage. There’s a brief write-up that includes the phrase _former backup dancer turned SE’s star choreographer_ and a few of his latest credits, including _the highly anticipated debut of SE’s latest boy group, Y KNOT_ , but not a lot else. The article’s more concerned with every last detail of Jongin’s ascent to stardom as the first Korean principal dancer of London’s Royal Ballet Company, complete with pictures from her latest European tour. "At least they spelled my name right."

"I'm sorry." She covers the paper with her hand. Taemin’s name is still visible through her long, slender fingers. "If this is getting out of control, just let me know. We can stop anytime. We can call it off—"

"Too late now," he says. "It's on the front page."

"Tae _min_."

"Jong _in_ ," he mimics the way she whines, brushing her hair out of her eyes. "I told you it was fine. You don't have time to be worrying about anything. Just focus on your leg and let me handle the rest, okay?"

She settles back into her chair, her teeth pressing a worried dent into her lower lip. "This is going to work, right?"

"Of course." He smiles, hoping it catches on. "Of course it is."

—

 

Jongin goes for one last appointment just to make sure she's ready to go on Monday. Her mother takes her. Taemin spends the whole day checking his phone during rehearsal hoping for updates, but she’s obviously too busy to give him the running commentary. He’ll catch up with her later, he knows, but he’s still anxious thinking about her ankle. Baekhyun comes by his office during his 35-minute lunch break and catches him flat on his back, staring into space.

"Hey," he says. Taemin startles and clubs his head on the arm of the couch as he tumbles onto the floor.

"Shit," he hisses, rubbing his temple. "Where'd you come from?"

"Technically, my mother, but I don't think that's what you're asking." Baekhyun grins cheekily, lifting one hip on the edge of Taemin's desk to sit. "How's Jongin? Driving you crazy with wedding preparations?"

"No, actually," Taemin says. He can be honest about that much, at least. She's been surprisingly relaxed about everything. Probably because it's not a real wedding, so it doesn't really matter if she gets the flowers of her dreams, or the dress she's always wanted. She's going to get a chance for a do-over with her real groom someday. 

"I can't believe you guys are really getting married this weekend." Baekhyun pulls his hair back off his forehead with both hands and looks down at Taemin, eyes narrowed. He looks ridiculous. "It’s so short-notice. This isn't some elaborate prank, is it?"

 _Not quite—getting warmer, though—_ "It's true." Taemin composes his face into a serious expression. "We're really getting married."

"All these years and I believed that 'just friends' thing." Baekhyun shakes his head. "I'm usually the one who figures these things out. Why didn't you tell us? We wouldn't have said anything if you didn't want us to."

"Her idea," Taemin says, lifting a shoulder to his ear. Just then, his phone vibrates against his stomach. He can't stop the grin stretching across his face when he unlocks the screen and reads the message: _going crazy. can we elope? get it over with?/??/_

 _isn't that basically what we're doing?_ Taemin taps out. _quit your whining and i'll bring you take-out tonight_

_ru trying to make me burst out of my wedding dress??!! no!_

Baekhyun's voice comes out of nowhere. "I should've seen it," he says, crossing his arms over his chest. 

"Seen what?"

"You should see the way you're looking at your phone," Baekhyun says, hopping off the desk. "Gross."

"I'm reading!" Taemin protests. "That's just my reading face!"

"Bullshit," Baekhyun says, and tosses a wink over his shoulder at Taemin. "There's no shame in being excited to talk to her, but you'll be home in a couple of hours, and I think they're looking for you in the dance studio."

"Of course they are." Taemin watches Baekhyun retreat, then looks down at his phone once more, hoping it'll buzz before he has to go back.

 

— 

 

He brings a bag of fried chicken home for her anyway, knowing it's exactly what she wants—and she can afford one night of this, besides. She protests for roughly half a second before she drags it into her lap and attacks it like a wild animal. She doesn't even bother with the chopsticks in the bottom of the bag and tears into it with her bare hands instead.

"So ladylike," Taemin says, sitting on the couch next to her. She throws a vaguely rude gesture in his direction, her mouth too full of chicken to manage a proper retort.

"I had no idea how many things go into planning a wedding," she says when she's down to the last mouthful. "Why did I think this was a good idea?" Taemin tosses her a wet wipe.

"How's your ankle?"

She wiggles her toes. "Hasn't fallen off yet, so I guess I can't complain."

"Come here." He pulls her feet into his lap. They're not dainty by any stretch of the imagination. They're true dancer's feet, callused and hard from years of abuse. His feet look pretty much the same. She leans back against the pillow and closes her eyes.

"I was reading about the PRP treatments today."

"Yeah?" He pulls at the brace's velcro strap, gently. It unspools and falls away. 

"It's going to get worse before it gets better." He digs his thumbs into the sole of her foot. She arches her neck back with a throaty groan. "God, that feels good."

"Are you sure you want to be here afterwards?” he asks for the millionth time, still not completely convinced. “You’re going to be by yourself all day, what if you fall—“

“I’m not going to fall,” she says. “I can’t go back home. Mom will want to hover and do things for me, and you know that drives me crazy. I need to be up and moving around if I’m going to get better. I’ll be fine.”

He moves lower to her heels, fingertips still moving in slow, tight circles. "It's going to be a pleasure to watch you learn how to walk on the crutches."

"Fuck you," she says, grinning. “I’ve been on crutches before. Could still beat you in a race.”

“You’re on.”

She falls asleep like that, reclined against the arm of the sofa with her feet in his lap and her hands crossed over her chest. His legs are full of pins and needles and he wants to move her so he can go to the bathroom but she's sleeping so soundly that he can't allow himself to do anything to disturb her.

It reminds him of the old days, back when she used to live in this building, too, right down the hall. It made seeing each other marginally easier, despite their busy schedules. He'd just started working at SE as an assistant, and she was in the company at KNB, already a rising star—front page features with NYLON and half a dozen fashion magazines, a media darling, praised for her work ethic and her "deeply impressive", "fluid" movement.

She'd come over after rehearsals and let herself in, if he was still at work (and he was always still at work, often until midnight, or later). He'd nudge open the front door cautiously and see her shoes lined up on the mat, and then, a little further, the ungainly, unladylike sprawl of her limbs as she slept wherever she'd landed—in the armchair, on the couch, in his bed.

The way she fell asleep in thirty seconds flat, coupled with the dark circles under her eyes—he can tell how exhausted she is. She's always been a drowsy person, but he can't ever remember her sleeping this hard when they were in school together. She'd come in from an early dawn practice at the studio and doze off at her desk during homeroom, but even then she'd been able to pull herself into an upright position when the teacher arrived. He remembers sitting in the back fields behind the school, skipping math class to doze in the grass, Jongin's head cushioned by his thigh. 

They're older now, but they keep falling back into this. He thinks about marrying her—even for pretend—and it doesn't feel that strange to him. A foregone conclusion, really, when he thinks back to sitting in the grass, watching her sleep, or elbowing her to move over just so he could claim a foot of space in his own bed. It doesn’t freak him out the way the idea of commitment usually does. Probably because she’s his best friend, and it’s not for real, anyway. The best kind of marriage. 

He settles back into the cushions and watches her until his eyelids grow heavy and he sleeps, too.

— 

The morning of the wedding, Jongin's more concerned about her procedure on Monday than she is about the wedding. Which is good, Taemin supposes, since that’s where her attention should be. The wedding is a necessary distraction to throw everyone else off—it doesn't matter if it's not perfect. No one will notice. They're not looking for it.

He'd gotten a haircut for the occasion—just a trim, enough to be able to see her when they exchange their vows. He hates it, but she keeps fussing over it, arranging it on his forehead, smiling—so, so pleased, even if she refuses to call him handsome. She wobbles crazily in her heels when she first puts them on and Taemin wonders if they're going to be able to pull this off without anyone noticing.

"Look at this," Jongin says, pulling up the hem of her dress to reveal a flesh-colored brace. "As long as people don't look too closely, I don't think anyone will notice."

"They're going to expect some sort of special dance from you," Taemin says, still struggling with his bow tie. She knocks his hands away and pulls it through with the practiced ease of fingers that have done this a million times before.

"They're going to have to buy a ticket in about six months if they want to see that." She tugs at both ends of his tie this way and that a little bit until she's satisfied that it's straight enough, then steps back and brushes off his shoulders. "You look very nice. I don't think anyone can tell you're a big fat liar.”

"Hey," he says as she steps away, giggling. "I'm not the one perpetrating a fraud on my best friends."

"You kind of are. They're your friends, too. I think they're even more your friends now that I don't live here anymore.”

"That's it," he says, shrugging his jacket on. “Let’s call the wedding off. I've decided I can do better than you."

“Fat chance. And you're all dressed up. You look so nice," Jongin says, running her palm down his chest fondly. It settles on his stomach, delicate fingers tipped a soft dove grey, splaying across his shirt front. "Don't waste it. We never get a chance to see you like this. I'm sure your mother will be very happy. When was the last time you wore a suit, anyway? Graduation?”

A knock on the door disrupts them and Baekhyun's head comes poking around the corner. "Break it up, you two." His eyes light up when he sees Jongin. "Wow, Jongin. You look amazing. You sure you want to lower your standards by marrying this guy? Last chance to change your mind.”

Jongin laughs and kisses Taemin on the cheek for show. "I'm sure," she says. Baekhyun grins and holds up his camera.

"Alright then. Let's make this thing between you two permanent, shall we?"

— 

After the ceremony, it takes a long time for them to leave the reception. Every time Jongin tries dragging Taemin to the door there's someone else looking to congratulate them. Jongin blushes scarlet when one well-meaning relative, Jongin's aunt—one of her father's sisters—starts asking if she's healthy enough to get pregnant right away and then elbows Taemin in the ribs.

"We're going to take some time to ourselves first," Taemin says smoothly, taking the responsibility of the lie away from Jongin. She relaxes a little, the corners of her mouth still faintly unhappy—it had been her idea to lie in the first place, but she's struggling with the execution. Taemin's more than happy to step in for her to ease her guilt, at least a little.

The aunt doesn't catch this. She visibly inflates with excitement, short bobbed hair moving against her red cheeks. "Oh, how wonderful! Your mothers will be so happy."

"Our careers are both very important to us right now. Maybe in a year or so."

"A year?" Jongin hisses at him as the aunt leaves. "I'm going to kill you, Taemin. Now she's going to go and tell everyone that we're planning on having a baby in a year."

"What are you so worried about?" Taemin asks, waving at a few people over her head. "It'll all be over in a year anyway. Your figure is safe."

"Still," she grumbles. "Can we leave now? My ankle's killing me, I really need to take the weight off it."

“You need to say goodbye to anyone?” he asks. It’ll be the last time she sees anyone for the next few months—at least, until she’s able to walk without a brace or the assistance of crutches. There's a chance—a decent chance, according to her doctor, who keeps using the word _optimistic_ —that she will be able to get past this without anyone the wiser. Better to keep her out of sight: no friends, limited family. She'll have to make do with Taemin and their parents for conversation, at least for the foreseeable future.

She looks over her shoulder at the gathering of their friends and family. Nobody’s watching them. “No,” she says quietly. Her fingers tuck into his elbow's bend, content to let him lead the way. “Let’s get out of here before anyone notices we’re gone.”

 

—

 

By the time they get back to Taemin’s place, she’s got a noticeable limp. She keeps clutching at his wrist to hold herself steady, squeezing his pulse so hard he can feel the bruises forming. She hasn’t said a word about it since they left, but he can tell she wants to. 

“You want me to carry you over the threshold?” he offers when they're in the hallway. She laughs, startled.

“Taemin, it’s just us here. You don’t have to pretend.”

“It’s your wedding day,” he says, keys still in the lock.

"Just open the door, will you? I need to sit down."

That decides it. She's still clinging to her wry pride, twisted into a half-smile on her pale, pain-weary face. He lifts her with an arm behind her knees. Normally, she'd fight it—anything to assert her independence—but she accepts it now, linking her arms around his neck.

He staggers for the first few steps until he catches his balance.

“Oh, come on! Way to hurt my pride, Taemin. I’m not that heavy. You need to spend some more time on your upper body.”

He manages, but it's a struggle. He nearly slams her into a doorframe, then she hugs his neck so hard she starts choking him, then he can't find the light switch. Front door to living room, living room to hall, hall to bedroom. He leans in to let her flip the next switch and deposits her on the bed. 

Gently, of course.

"Work on that," Jongin tells him, her grin wide and delighted anyway. "Your future wife is going to take all that huffing and puffing as an insult and then your marriage will be over before it even starts."

"Marry someone taller," Taemin shoots back. "Much, much taller. That was like carrying a ladder bridal-style."

She doesn't laugh, too distracted by the silver ring on her finger. She tears her eyes away from it long enough: "You didn’t tell me you were getting these. It's beautiful, by the way—you spent too much for something that isn't real."

"Nobody would have believed we were serious if I bought you a cheap ring." It's a flimsy excuse, even voiced aloud, but it still sounds better to him than _it's just something I had to do. I wanted you to have it._

“That was a good fake wedding,” she says, thrusting her arms out in a deep stretch. “I hope our real ones are just as good. We’ll have an amicable divorce, right?”

He chuckles, fiddling with the ankle strap of her shoe to check on her brace. “Only if you give me half of your stuff. And I get to keep this place.” He tosses one pump over his shoulder, then the other. They land somewhere behind him with a loud clunk.

“There’s always a catch.” She sits up, fingers smearing the makeup on her eyelids. “I should change.”

He lingers for just a moment too long. She stares up at him, the shoulder strap of her dress slipping. “What? You were expecting a fake wedding night, too?”

“No, no.” He laughs nervously. “Let me know if you need any help. With—uh—the ankle, I mean.”

He hears the quiet clattering of the bathroom cabinets as she gets ready for bed. He can hear the pain evident in every one of her slow movements. Even the amount of time it takes her to shower and brush her teeth seems excessively long for her. 

After, she doesn't go straight to bed. She comes out in her sweatpants and her brace, an ugly pair of glasses perched on her nose, and sits next to him on the couch where he's got the blankets made up. The living room's his temporary bedroom for the next few weeks, happy to relinquish the proper bed to Jongin, who needs it far more than he does.

He's lying in the dark, head supported by his arm, watching television. Or, half-watching, anyway. He's nearly asleep. She clambers over him, her hands, bracing her weight over his head, smiling down at him. She nestles herself in the space behind his body, warm and sure, her chin balanced on the point of his shoulder to better see the television screen.

"What," he grunts, a little drowsy.

"Scared," she says. "About Monday."

He wants to tell her not to worry. That they'll keep trying anything to make sure she's alright. That she's in good hands—that she can stay as long as she wants—that he will pretend to be her husband for as long as it takes to get her back on the stage.

"I know," he says instead. "It's okay. I'll be right there with you."

A light snore replies.


	4. Chapter 4

Monday morning, what little joy remaining from the wedding's afterglow evaporates, and Taemin's left with a very disgruntled Jongin. She argues about everything—she wants to sleep in for another half an hour even though they're already running late, she wants to drive to the appointment herself, she wants to go back for the procedure herself. Taemin ascribes it to nerves, but it's no less frustrating when she's trying to refuse the wheelchair back out to the car. Post-injection, her ankle's securely wrapped now, but she seems bound and determined not to let it hold her back, even when she really should be taking it easy. Taemin can already tell it's going to be a struggle to get her to relax.

"I'm supposed to start moving around," Jongin protests, hand shielding her face with her discharge papers to block out the unrelenting sunshine. "I'm going to lose all the muscle tone—"

"I read the pamphlet," Taemin says, hearing the annoyingly pragmatic voice of his mother come out of his mouth. "You're supposed to rest it and elevate it for a few days, then maybe you can try moving around on the crutches. It's not surgery, but you still need time to heal."

"God, shut up. You're not my doctor," she snaps, fighting him off again when he tries to take hold of her elbow and help her into the car. Taemin sends a helpless look over her head to the nurse pushing the wheelchair.

The nurse flashes him a patient smile, choosing her next words carefully. "Let us know if she's still experiencing pain in a few days. We can re-evaluate and put her in a boot if there are mobility issues." 

Taemin leans in to the open door to help Jongin buckle herself in. She turns her face away from him, staring into the distance. He catches the subtle quiver of her chin, every tendon in her neck taut with the strain of holding in her tears.

"Ms Kim?"

"I think she's tired," Taemin says, giving Jongin's hand a quick squeeze before he shuts the door. "I'm going to get her home so she can rest."

The nurse's eyes fall to the ring on Taemin's finger. "I'm—glad she'll have a support system for her recovery," she says, and Taemin realizes on his walk around the back of the car that she knows exactly who they are. She bows a few times and stands back on the curb with one hand on the wheelchair, watching them drive away.

Taemin waits until they're safely queued at a red light to break the silence. "I think she recognized you."

"Hm?"

"The nurse. I think she knew who you were."

Jongin scoffs. "Of course she did. They all did. Being a professional dancer is a pretty important detail for them to be aware of when they're working on my ankle."

"That doesn't worry you?"

"Dr Jung's the best orthopedic surgeon in Seoul. He sees professionals like me all the time. His team knows how to be discreet. They're not allowed to talk about their patients." She folds her arms over her chest. "You can't tell me you've never had one of your idols injure themselves, not with the training schedule you're on." Her tone's on a knife's edge, testy and grim all at once.

"You're right," he apologizes, his voice gentle. He nearly reaches out to hold her hand but thinks better of it, not when she's this frustrated with her situation. He doesn't want her to think he's pitying her, he just aches with the reality: he can listen to her, he can take the brunt of her anger, but he can't take this away from her. "I wasn't thinking of it like that. I was just thinking about you. I know you want to keep this quiet."

"I'm sorry," she says, looking away from him and off into the distance. He sees the tear working its way down the side of her nose. His hand finds her knee.

"Does it hurt a lot?"

"Yeah," she says, scrubbing at her face with her fist. "Yeah, it does. I'm sorry. You're being so great. You _married_ me because I asked you to help me hide this and I'm just—yelling at you for being nice."

"In sickness and in health, right?" he teases, just to get her to laugh. It startles a sound out of her chest that sounds more like a sob.

"Shut up," she says again, laughing, crying, pushing his shoulder away from her. "You're an idiot."

 

—

 

Jongin goes straight to bed for a nap when they get home. Taemin waits until she's settled in and then checks his phone—six missed calls, five of them from his assistant and one from Baekhyun. He clicks through the first five—all last-minute concerns about the music video shoot on Wednesday, something about a set piece that doesn't leave enough room for the choreography—nothing he can possibly address here while he's at home. He replies with a text message: _If it doesn't translate on cam we can switch to V form instead of rows. Try + let me kno if it works_

He saves Baekhyun's for last. The minute he hears that scratchy voice, his heart sinks. _"Hey, Taemin. Congratulations again! I'm trying to get ahold of your lovely wife but her phone's off. I know you've got to get back to work tomorrow so I'm thinking of sweeping her off her feet for lunch. Let me know what she says, and tell her to turn on her phone!"_

"Shit," Taemin says to no one in particular, throwing his phone on the couch. They hadn't anticipated Taemin having to go back to work so soon. The cover story's _supposed_ to be simple: Jongin's _supposed_ to be going 'back to London' to tie up loose ends and collect some things from her apartment. Her ankle will be able to bear the weight in about three weeks, if everything goes smoothly, so they'd assumed hiding her away for a month would do it. Dancing will come later, once she's been given the okay to start training again.

But Baekhyun asking where she is—asking to hang out with her—it can't happen until she can walk by herself. He's not supposed to know.

Taemin thinks about it while he makes coffee and finally decides to text Baekhyun back: _"Put her on a plane 2 London this morning :( u can buy me lunch though"_

_"Ha, buy ur own food. She left u already?"_

_"lol alert the tabloids"_

Baekhyun sends back a string of emojis— _eyes, eyes, eyes, camera, moneybags, moneybags, moneybags_ and then _"tell her i'm mad she didn't say goodbye. when is she coming back??/?/"_

Taemin doesn't have a response to that, so he throws his phone across the room and ignores any subsequent message notifications, feigning deafness as a defense mechanism because he's having trouble coming up with a lie that doesn't sound like completely transparent bullshit.

 

—

 

Jongin sleeps for what feels like forever. Taemin busies himself with housework—not a typical chore for him, given his long hours at work and his complete apathy when it comes to doing anything when he gets home, but he throws himself into preparations for Jongin's extended stay at his place, making sure the apartment's easy to navigate on crutches. He doesn't want her falling while she's by herself, so he tidies up the dance magazines and the volumes of manga scattered across the living room floor, and then mops the kitchen for something else to do while he waits for Jongin to stir. 

The afternoon stretches long, the bright sunshine giving way to a dusky, orange twilight that bathes the apartment in a surreal amber glow. Taemin's never actually been at home to witness it before and stands in the middle of his living room while the light changes again, shadows creeping along the walls.

"Taemin?"

Taemin jerks back to attention at the sound of Jongin calling for him from the bedroom. Her voice is thick with exhaustion, and she's barely sitting up when he rounds the corner and sees her sitting there, so small in the middle of the queen-sized bed, covers gathered at the end of the bed. She breaks into a tired grin when she sees him, can't help it, and Taemin's glad to see she's feeling more like herself instead of the cross, squabbling Jongin he'd been dealing with all morning.

"How long did I sleep?" She rakes her fingers through the escaped flyaway hair from her ponytail, still squinting at the brightness of the hall light. "I can't believe it's dark out."

"All day." He flicks on the overhead lamp and laughs at her wailed protests and threats of bodily harm. "Are you hungry? You slept right through lunch."

She rubs her eyes. "Fuck, yes. I'm starving. And my ankle's killing me."

Taemin sits on the end of the bed—gingerly, of course, trying not to jostle the mattress too much and upset her. He pats his lap. "Let me see it."

"It's really gross," she warns him even as she pulls back the comforter and lifts her leg out with both hands. She's still moving very carefully, lips pressed in a tight line. It's obviously still very tender. "There's a lump the size of a crabapple from the injection."

"Is that normal?"

"Yeah. It's all the—you know, the blood and plasma whatever that they injected into it. They said my body will absorb it eventually, while it's repairing itself." She pulls up the leg of her yoga pants to expose it, a grotesque deformation on her normally slim, shapely ankle. "I don't know. It looks so much worse than it did earlier." She goes to move her foot and winces, apparently deciding better of it. "Feels worse, too, _fuck_."

"That's disgusting," Taemin says, a little awestruck, although he's not at all repulsed by it. He's seen a lot worse—broken bones, dislocations, all in the name of dance—and injuries tend to fascinate him the same way they did back when he was a little boy, anyway. "Is it hard? Can I touch it?"

"No, you can't touch it!" Jongin laughs and swats him away. "It hurts! Jesus, Taemin."

Trusting that Jongin's appetite is back to normal, he orders one of everything from the restaurant down the block and brings it all into the bedroom, plastic bags of take-out containers hanging on every finger. He'll have to air out the room later to get the smell of fried food and grease out, but it's worth it to sit next to Jongin on the bed with his laptop propped up on his knees, watching an old American show he pirated a long time ago but never got around to finishing. She keeps leaning over him to pick pieces of beef out of his noodles, grinning victoriously around her chopsticks every time he complains.

Eventually, though, the eating slows until they're pushing lukewarm tteokbokki around with their chopsticks, still hungry for the sight and smell of the bright red chili paste, but too full to put anything else in their mouths.

"Come on," Taemin says, holding out the last piece of fish cake over to Jongin, cupping his hand underneath it to catch any of the drips. She shakes her head and covers her mouth with a forceful hand.

"No, I'm going to puke. You eat it."

"I can't."

"Don't waste it."

"You eat it, then," he says, dropping it in front of her. She looks at it forlornly, poking it, playing with it.

"I'm too full," she whines, dropping her chopsticks on her tray and kicking out with her good foot. She nearly upends a styrofoam carton of half-eaten pajeon onto the carpet before Taemin intervenes, setting it aside on the nightstand to be dealt with later.

"You'll be hungry again in an hour," Taemin says knowingly.

"I will not. I'm never going to move again."

With some difficulty, she rolls onto her side so she's looking up at Taemin, who's still sitting up against the headboard, his laptop balanced on his thighs. She smiles at him, sunny and warm, her eyes crinkling at the corners. "Thank you. I needed that. I'm going to have to run two marathons to work it all off, but it was worth it."

"Sure," Taemin says, patting the crown of her head. "It's been a while since we ate our weight at Mrs. Yong's place."

"She's still running that place? She's got to be in her eighties, at least."

"Hey, don't underestimate her. She's feisty for her age! She still flirts with me every time I go in."

"Oh, god." Jongin rolls her eyes. " _Please,_ Taemin. She does not."

"She does! She always asks if I've found a woman to feed me well. I had to tell her I'm a married man now, hands off."

Jongin laughs, her hand comfortably on Taemin's thigh, her head resting on his bicep. Her wrist tilts back and forth gently, just enough that the silver band around her ring finger catches the light. Something seems to occur to her—

"Oh!" she exclaims, pawing the pillows aside to sit upright. She lunges forward, retrieving Taemin's laptop from its perch. "Give me, hold on—Baekhyun sent back some of the first pictures. Just a preview. They look really great—"

"Ah, yeah. Baekhyun—I, uh. He called, asking if he could take you to lunch."

Jongin's hands freeze over the keyboard, her expression stricken. "Oh, no. What did you say?"

"I told him you were going back to London for a while."

"Yeah, good. Thank you," Jongin says, nodding stiffly. "That's—probably best. I'll let him know, too. And I'll try to limit contact with everyone while I'm hiding out here, to sell the story."

"Do you think that'll work? Are people going to be curious that there aren't any pictures of you walking around London?"

"Nobody photographs me when I'm in London, so I think it'll be fine." She smiles. "It's not like here. I blend in there, especially when I'm not in costume."

"You walk around the streets of London in your pancake tutu and toe shoes? Now that's something I'd love to see."

"Shut _up_ Taemin, you know what I meant. I'm just saying, I'm not—London's fairy. Nobody cares about me when I'm not doing my job, and I like it that way."

"Nobody'll call for you at the theatre?"

"Season's nearly over. My manager—thinks I'm home getting married, but either way, all he knows is that I've taken some time off for personal reasons and that I'll be back next season. He has no reason to be in touch with me otherwise."

Taemin rubs his lower lip with his thumb, an anxiety thing he'd picked up from Jongin years ago. "I don't want them to be mad at you," he says. "When this all comes out that we're not—you know, that this whole thing was because of your ankle. Are you sure you don't want to tell Baekhyun—Sehun, maybe, too, I know she'll call for you eventually—and I mean, I'll lie for you, but are you _really_ sure you want to keep this secret from them, too?"

"I thought about it—Taemin, I can't. Not right now. Maybe—maybe when I'm in rehab and it's going alright. I just don't want to deal with anyone asking me how it's going. It's bad enough you're around—no, that's not what I meant," she hedges, catching the dismayed look in his eyes before he even has a chance to realize the expression his face is making. "It sucks being reminded of this. I know you expect me to get better, but I have no idea what's going to happen, and it's—a lot of pressure, I don't know." She trails off, exasperated, throwing her hands in the air. Taemin catches them and squeezes them between his own hands, their rings clinking when he laces their fingers together. 

"Look," he says. "No pressure. Not from me, okay? Take it slow. I can pretend to be—this, your husband, whatever—I can cover for you for as long as you need. That's the deal and I'm happy to be there for you, Jongin."

A tiny smile works its way into the corners of her mouth. She dips her chin to her chest, nodding, shy, the same way she always gets when she's having a hard time accepting a compliment. "Thanks," she says, barely audible, pulling her hands away from him and back into her lap.

He lets her tab through the photographs for a while, watching out of the corner of his eye as she scrunches her mouth, scrutinizing every tiny flaw—" _God,_ look at my makeup, I look awful—oh, the flowers, I wish I'd gotten more of a variety, but there was just no time—"

"It's fine," he assures her. "Everything looked great, especially considering you put this together in a week. This was just a test, remember? Now you know what to do when you're doing it for real."

"Yeah, I guess," she says, still looking dissatisfied. She hits the space bar again and the next picture comes up—one of the first candid photographs Baekhyun snapped, the two of them before the ceremony. Jongin's fussing with his tie, her mouth open with that amazing ugly laughter of hers. He's looking down at her hands, smiling, a hand on her hip as he watches her work. Comfortable and easy, the way it always is between them, even in the quiet moments when they're supposed to be pretending to be more than just best friends. 

She makes a disgusted noise and closes the laptop with a snap. "Ew. My face looks terrible."

"It does not. You look amazing. I love it when you laugh like that."

"It's gross. My mouth was _wide_ open, you could see all of my teeth!"

"You looked like you were really happy."

"I was." Jongin squints up at him, her hands going quiet. "Did you—didn't you think I was happy? It was... I had a really good time on Saturday. Best fake wedding I've ever been to."

The silence hangs heavy between them, a shiver of apprehension working its way up Taemin's muscles. He can't look away from her, and she's staring back with a strange look on her face—hopeful, almost, and maybe a little sad. He doesn't know why things suddenly got weird and heavy when they'd been joking with each other so easily just minutes before, but he's desperate for a subject change.

"I'm—going to be gone all day tomorrow, I'm sorry," he says, finally, to break the tension. "It's going to be a really long day, so you should call your parents to come by in case you need anything."

"I've got crutches to get around. I'll be fine."

"Still. Just in case—I don't want you to be stuck here. What if you get hurt? Or you can't get up, or you drop your crutches—"

"Taemin, shut up. I'm not incapacitated. I _can_ walk, it just hurts to put weight on it right now. I can call if I need help. It'll be fine. Now, what's the plan for tomorrow?" she asks, leaning away from him, rearranging the blankets over her lap with exaggerated deliberacy, running her hands over the same imaginary wrinkle over and over again.

"Teasers all day," Taemin says, already dreading the long day ahead of him. It's going to take hours—he's not going to be home until after midnight, at least, and he's going to have to turn around and go right back to work Wednesday morning for the music video shoot. "At least there are only six of them." He'd been on the sidelines for the last boy group SE had debuted, a ten piece logistical nightmare. 

"Are they any good?"

"Honestly... they've got a lot of work cut out for them. But if they work hard, yeah, I think they've got a decent shot for some rookie award at the end of the year."

"Music?"

"It's good. Catchy. Chanyeol wrote it—I've got it around here somewhere, I can play it for you if you want. It's going to be a good debut single. He always does really well figuring out what's going to be on trend, but it's—interesting? Less straightforward pop. Very soulful."

"I bet you're sick of it. I know I get sick of hearing anything I'm rehearsing."

He chuckles. "I am, a little. Although you know how it is—you grow to hate something so much, and then it's stuck in your head—"

"—and then you end up humming it everywhere you go. Yeah, I know it well." She looks at him, smiling, twisting the ring around and around her finger. "Did you ever—did you ever wish that you started earlier?"

"I started dancing when I was four, Jongin, I don't know how much earlier I could've started, considering I was in diapers before that."

"I mean. Did you want—that, instead? Not choreography, but your own thing. To be a performer? Like—" _me_ , she doesn't say, but he catches her meaning anyway. He shrugs.

"I work hard enough without the scrutiny of fans," he says. "I mean, you saw me in our classes together—I was never going to be a ballerino like you. And I can do all of this—maybe better than the trainees now, but if I was an idol... you and I couldn't be friends anymore without it becoming something complicated. I'd be too busy to see you. And I'd never get to work on my own projects, I'd always be listening to someone else's direction."

"You hate being told what to do."

"I don't mind it, I just hope people don't expect me to actually _do_ whatever they're saying."

She yawns. She's been sleeping all day—but it's been a long, painful day for her, with many more in her future. Taemin takes that as his cue to clear up the dinner things and leave her to rest. She doesn't protest when he pulls the blankets up under her arms and turns the light off. The bedside lamp's still on, on its lowest setting, casting a warm, rosy glow around the room.

"I just want you to enjoy yourself," she murmurs, eyelids sinking. She looks so peaceful with her hands folded under her face and he can't resist reaching out to tuck a loose strand of hair behind her ear. 

"I do," he says. "I'm happy, too. Promise."

"Mmm." She rolls over, drowsy and slow, to sprawl out on her back, bad ankle poking out from under the duvet. She smiles. "Good. You should be happy. That's... the most... important..."

He waits for the last word, but she's fast asleep.

 

—


	5. Chapter 5

Taemin wakes up before dawn the next morning. He needs to be at the studio by half past four, which is why he's stumbling around in the dark at 3AM trying to find a pair of jeans that can pass for clean, or at least clean-adjacent, in the mess of clothes in his laundry hamper. His back is sore from sleeping on the couch. He spends an extra ten minutes trying to stretch out the stiff muscles on the living room floor before he gives up and goes to get breakfast.

He checks in on Jongin before he leaves. She's sleeping soundly, smack in the middle of the bed. Her crutches are up against the night stand, along with a bottle of water and a note Taemin had written on the back of an old envelope. _"I'm in teaser shoots all day, so if you have an emergency, call me at the studio. Don't burn the building down trying to cook for yourself, don't fuck up my Netflix queue, and don't go looking for my porn ^^v"_

Taemin stumbles into the company with twenty minutes to spare, his eyes still half-shut and gluey with the meager sleep he'd managed to catch last night. Someone—the PD's assistant, probably, judging by the swish of ponytail as they whirl past—shoves a cardboard cup of coffee in his hand, still scorching hot, and hurries off before he can fully open his eyes to thank them.

"Welcome back!"

Taemin finally opens his eyes to get a good look at Soojung, one of Y KNOT's coordinators. She's got a cup of coffee of her own twice the size of Taemin's, except she's wearing a full face of makeup and looks infinitely more conscious than Taemin feels.

"Have you slept?" he asks, scowling.

"Napped in your office in between the photo shoot last night and their call time this morning," she says, which means no, not really. "I'm fine."

"How many of those have you had?"

"I'm _fine_ ," she repeats more sternly this time, falling in step with him. "How was the wedding? I saw the pictures Baekhyun took—he was showing them off to everyone yesterday. She's gorgeous, Taemin. I didn't realize you were friends with Kim Jongin. How'd you convince her to marry you?"

Taemin snorts. "Blackmail, of course."

"I thought so. She's too pretty for you, Taemin. But—honestly, congratulations." They're standing in front of the changing room now. He catches the awkward smile on her face before she hides it in the lid of her coffee cup.

"Thanks," he says, holding the door to the changing room open with his spare hand. "Get some sleep, okay?"

"Not this week," she calls over her shoulder, already bustling on ahead to check on the set.

Taemin's relieved to see that all six members are sitting around the changing room, in varying states of readiness. Hyunwoo, the maknae of the group, has his feet up on the dressing room table, engrossed in something on his smartphone while the stylist tries to finish setting his hairstyle. Taemin smacks his ankle as he passes, forcing him to sit up straight and be respectful.

All at once, the members notice him and he's greeted with a chorus of "Hyung!", all sounding surprisingly cheerful for the early hour and how little sleep they've gotten. Taemin waves and takes a seat on the squashed love seat next to Jaehyun, Y KNOT's rapper. He's watching something on his phone, too, although he tries to hide the screen from Taemin the minute he sits down.

"What? What is it?" Taemin laughs, swiping at Jaehyun's hand to steal the phone. "Are you watching porn at this hour, you pervert?"

"N-no," Jaehyun says, but it's too late—Taemin has his phone in his hand. He stops dead when he sees what's on the screen: not a filthy movie, but a familiar video he's watched a dozen times. Jongin in her first production after she'd secured her spot in London—Stravinsky's _Firebird_ —swathed in scarlet and sequins, looking every bit the part of the phoenix. Jaehyun's still got the earbuds in his hand, so Taemin can't hear the music, but still he knows the melody by heart, the way she lifts onto her toes in a dozen perfect double fouettes like she was born to fly. He'd been in the audience for this one and still remembers it like it was yesterday, gripping the program with his sweaty hands, transfixed by her.

"Oh," Taemin says awkwardly, handing the phone back to Jaehyun. "I—okay."

"She's a pretty noona," Minjae, Y KNOT's best dancer, says earnestly. Of course they know about Taemin's marriage—he'd had to explain why he was taking time off right before their debut—but he'd forgotten that they'd probably see the newspapers and get curious enough to search for her on Naver.

"Yeah, she is," Taemin says, grinning a little despite his embarrassment. "And I think it's a good idea for you to watch other dance styles—but not this week. You need to focus."

—

Filming starts promptly at 6AM and stretches long past the lunch hour. Finally, the PD calls for a break, and Taemin takes the opportunity to escape to his office and check his phone. A few texts from Jongin, all along the same lines: _I'm bored, my ankle hurts, come back and keep me company._ He laughs out loud at the last one, an explicit rant about some tentacle porn she'd apparently found. He knows exactly what it is—a gag gift he'd gotten from Baekhyun for his birthday last year, something he kept lying around not for titillation (well, mostly, anyway) but because it amused him.

 _If u throw it away i'm divorcing u_ he says.

 _you sick fuck_ she replies almost instantly. And then, a few minutes later: _how are people into this?_

_ur watching it? ;) ;) ;) u like what u see?_

_FUCK YOU, TAEMIN. I TOLD YOU. I'M BORED._

Just then, Baekhyun comes breezing into Taemin's office with bags of french fries from McDonalds, still piping hot. Taemin digs in, cramming five or six in his mouth at once. "Thank you," he manages with his mouth full. "I haven't eaten since breakfast, I'm starving."

"How's Jongin? Do you miss her already?" Baekhyun asks, his own mouth full of fries as well. Taemin hesitates a beat, but it goes unnoticed by Baekhyun, who's digging through the wad of napkins in the paper bag to get the few stragglers that had escaped from the carton.

"Yeah," Taemin says. "Obviously we didn't think through the timing of this."

"Why _did _you choose last weekend?" Baekhyun asks, licking salt from his fingertips. His tone is genuinely curious and free from judgment, but Taemin still feels guilty.__

__"We just didn't want to wait anymore," Taemin says, deciding it's probably the best answer because it's impossible to argue. "With our careers, there was never going to be a perfect time."_ _

__"It just seems so fast. And you're not going to see her for a while, right? She's in London, and you're going to be tied up here for the next month or so—unless—" His eyes widen. "Taemin, you're not quitting SE, are you?"_ _

__"No, I told you. We'll be here for a while. She's going to take some time off."_ _

__Baekhyun hums thoughtfully, eyes still on Taemin. "Okay," he says finally, crumpling their empty bags together and tossing them in the trash. "We'd be lost without you, you know. You're the best of any of us." And it's at least partly true. They've been gaining a lot of attention, both nationally and internationally, since Taemin started choreographing for them._ _

__Jonghyun, Y KNOT's manager, comes through the door without bothering to knock. He'd been at the wedding over the weekend, too, but he'd slipped in late, sometime after the vows, and hadn't been able to stay very long—just enough to kiss Jongin on the cheek and shake Taemin's hand, and then he was gone again. "So you two are hiding out in here," he notes, sprawling on Taemin's couch and covering his eyes with the crook of his elbow. "I won't tell if you hide me, too. They're driving me crazy."_ _

__"Aw, hyung," Baekhyun says, plopping down in Jonghyun's lap and hooking an elbow around the back of his neck. "We'd be more than happy to drive you crazy, too."_ _

__"I said I wasn't going to do this anymore," Jonghyun says, sounding so worn out that Taemin's surprised that he's even awake right now. They're all running on fumes this week and it's only going to get worse. Y KNOT is Jonghyun's fourth group at SE, an experienced veteran, capable of handling the rookie years without flinching or losing his cool. Taemin's grateful to be working with someone as steady as Jonghyun. "I said I was done after Violet Flashlight's debut. _They_ nearly killed me. I'm an idiot for agreeing to this."_ _

__"You're an idiot for a lot of reasons," Baekhyun teases. Jonghyun shoves him off of his lap and onto the floor, then redirects his attention to Taemin, who's too tired to laugh at the entire exchange, although he wants to._ _

__"So I hear Jongin's back in Europe already."_ _

__Besides the wedding pictures, Baekhyun's obviously been spreading that particular piece of news around too. Taemin nods. "Yeah. She left yesterday. She'll be back in time for the showcase, though." He doesn't know where that lie came from or why he'd offered it up without asking, but once it comes out of his mouth it's too late to take back._ _

__"That sucks. Hey, if you're lonely, I'd be more than willing to keep you company."_ _

__Taemin flutters his eyelashes. "Why, Jonghyun, I'm a married man now, you can't just ask me things like that."_ _

__"I meant a movie or something, you asshole. Forget it!" Jonghyun bursts out laughing. "Tell her to hurry back. We miss your better half."_ _

__—_ _

__Filming pushes right into an evening rehearsal, the last one before they film for the music video tomorrow, so Taemin doesn't get home until 1AM. He'd been tempted to just stay at the office and nap on his couch, since he's got to turn around in three hours and come right back, but he's been worrying about Jongin all day and wants to check in on her._ _

__He's surprised to find her wide awake instead, sprawled out on the living room couch where he's been sleeping, watching something on the television with the volume turned down all the way. She looks up when he comes in, pushing up on her elbows._ _

__"Are you okay?" she asks._ _

__"Yeah. Shit, why are you awake?" Taemin demands, stifling a yawn with his fist. He's dead on his feet and he wants nothing more than to fall face first onto his pillow and sleep. "It's late."_ _

__"I know it's late. I was worried about you," she says, hugging the knee of her good leg to her chest, looking sheepish._ _

__"I told you I was going to be late," he says, sitting down on the arm of the couch. She leans into his thigh and sighs heavily._ _

__"Our poor Taemin. Your hours suck."_ _

__"I know," he says, reluctantly getting back to his feet and holding out his hand for her. "Come on, let me help you to bed. You shouldn't wait up for me like this. It's going to be like this all week."_ _

__"I've been sleeping all day," she protests, slipping her hand in his anyway. "I'm not tired. You should take the bed."_ _

__"You should be resting your ankle. How does it feel, by the way?"_ _

__"Hurts. Still." She switches her grip from Taemin's hand to his waist. He moves slowly beside her for support, matching her hobbling step-for-step until she can put her hands on the mattress and ease herself down into a seated position. "Taemin, are you sure you don't just want to sleep here? The bed's big enough."_ _

__He stands at the foot of the bed, staring at the row of pillows lined neatly against the headboard. He does, but—_ _

__"I don't want to kick you in my sleep and hurt your ankle," he says lamely. She sits on the end of the bed, fingers lacing with his to encourage him._ _

__"Don't kick me then, unless you want me to kick you back," she says, the laugh lines at the corners of her mouth softening. "Come on, Taemin, you look exhausted. You can't sleep on the couch tonight."_ _

__He sways, feeling the irresistible pull of a coil mattress after a week on the couch, and then relents. "Fine. My alarm's going off in a couple hours," he warns, shucking his jeans in one practiced movement. They're both so used to changing in front of each other—years of dance classes, of sneaking off to swim at the Y when they were supposed to be in school—that she doesn't avert her eyes at Taemin's shamelessness. She's seen it all before._ _

__Instead, she shrugs and gestures at the brace. "Ankle's keeping me up anyway. Don't worry about me."_ _

__He pauses, one leg in his sweatpants, the other bent awkwardly in anticipation. He's so out of it that he'd completely forgotten to ask. "Do you need me to get you anything? A glass of water? Have you eaten?"_ _

__"I'm fine. Your mother came over tonight and brought me dinner. There are leftovers in the fridge if you want them for lunch tomorrow—honestly, she brought enough to feed an army."_ _

__He nods absently, pulling at the strings of his sweatpants. She settles back against the pillows, one hand on the lamp, waiting for him to join her on his side of the bed before she turns out the light._ _

__—_ _

__It's a hard week._ _

__No, hard's an understatement. Hard's a vacation compared to the week Taemin has. He's averaging two hours of sleep a night. His head hits the pillow and in a blink of a sleepy eye later he's dragging himself up to silence the alarm before it disturbs Jongin. Their first full run-through on Thursday with costumes and sound goes _terribly_. Hyunwoo lands hard on his knee and has to sit out the last half, holding an ice pack to keep the swelling down. Taemin can't help but scold him about being careful with himself, thinking of Jongin back in his apartment, still unable to walk without a pronounced limp. Hyunwoo nearly cries—he's a kid, after all, barely seventeen, he's still under the impression he's invincible—and Taemin softens just enough to ruffle his hair and tell him to feel better._ _

__Saturday afternoon finally rolls around and there's nothing much for him to do. The boys are in vocal lessons until dinner, addressing Baekhyun's notes from the first recording session so they can re-record the spots that need fixing. Taemin leaves Eric, Y KNOT's leader, a list of things to practice for Monday's run-through if they get to it—and knowing Eric's diligence, he'll make _sure_ they get around to it eventually—and then slips away to get back to Jongin before someone can ask him to stick around and help out with preparations for the upcoming showcase._ _

__The guilt overwhelms him when he steps out into the sunshine. He hasn't seen daylight for a full week, but Jonghyun and Baekhyun are stuck inside, running the vocal rehearsals, doomed to another week of fluorescent lights and not enough sleep. He fumbles with the key in the ignition before he finally gets it going and drives home in a daze, Y KNOT's debut track—" _Love War_ ”—cycling through his head, over and over, the same eight bars driving him crazy even though he's got his CD player turned off. He nearly dozes off in the elevator ride up to his floor, and the struggle to find his front door key takes long enough that the door swings open abruptly and then halts against the chain, Jongin's face peering owlishly through the gap._ _

__"You're home early," she says, slipping the chain from the catch. "Did you quit?"_ _

__"Funny. What are you doing up? You should be—"_ _

__She holds up a hand to cut him off. "Look, I do _nothing_ but rest. A short walk across the apartment is good for me. And besides, I had to get up to open the chain for you, anyway."_ _

__"No crutches?"_ _

__"I weighed the options and decided I'd rather have a limp for the rest of my life than to have armpit calluses."_ _

__"Cute."_ _

__"Really, it's not bad." Gingerly, she slides her bad foot in front of her, still wrapped in her brace. Her gait isn't quite back to normal, but it's less of a lame dog's hobble than before. "Doctor said if I wasn't feeling any pain, it was okay to start walking without them."_ _

__"And you're not feeling pain?"_ _

__"It could be worse."_ _

__"That's not a no."_ _

__"I'm fine," she says. "I'm not walking around the block yet, but I can do this much."_ _

__He sits down in the middle of the floor, too tired to make it to the couch. "Food?"_ _

__"I can make something."_ _

__"No, you can't."_ _

__"You think I can't cook?"_ _

__"I _know_ you can't," he says. "I've known you long enough that I'll never eat anything you cook. There are better ways to die."_ _

__She smacks him upside the head as she walks past. He ignores it, laughing, already dialing the number for Mrs. Yong's restaurant downstairs. "You want one of everything again?" he asks while it rings._ _

__"No! Are you kidding me? That's too much. I just want a salad—"_ _

__"Too late." He gets to his feet, brushing past her with a grin on his face. "Ah, Mrs. Yong! It's Taemin. Did you miss me?"_ _

__—_ _

__Mrs. Yong promises to personally bring their order by the apartment so she can see Jongin. Taemin may have been slightly exaggerating when he threatened to order the entire menu, but he wasn't off by much. He doesn't even flinch when the total comes to a number close to what it costs to feed all six members of Y KNOT._ _

__Settled in on the couch to wait for the food's arrival, Jongin confiscates Taemin's phone and starts tabbing through his picture album, watching the latest rehearsal videos. Her face scrunches, eyes sharp and critical, scanning their movements for the first sign of disharmony._ _

__"I don't get it," she says, holding his phone horizontally to try and get a better look at the video. "This is what's selling nowadays? They're all babies. Are they old enough to dance like that, with the hip—oh, wow, okay—that's a little provocative, Taemin, they're too young to do that."_ _

__"Hey, grandma. Stop criticizing my work." From his position flat on his back on the floor, he reaches out and catches hold of her good ankle. "They all think you're a pretty noona."_ _

__"Oh, do they?" Her face lights up. "Should I come in and meet them?" Realization hits her before Taemin can even respond. "I—well, maybe when I'm out of the brace and I'm walking a little better."_ _

__"They'd like that," he says. "I—uh. That reminds me. I said you'd be back in time for the showcase, but obviously, if you're not feeling up to it, we can just say you stayed in London for another week."_ _

__She seems more eager than he feels. Not that he can blame her: she's been cooped up in his place for a week, and it'll be another one before her first trip beyond the apartment and back into the world. "We'll see. I've got a check-up that morning. If he gives me the green light, I'm all yours." She sighs. "I can't wait to dance again."_ _

__"Will you relax?"_ _

__"Will _you_? Do you know what it's like to take a whole week off? I'm dying here."_ _

__"Take the time off now, or be a prematurely bitter dance instructor with a huge cane. Your choice."_ _

__"You're lucky I don't have a cane right now. You're such a smartass—"_ _

__A sharp knock comes at the door. Taemin sits up, narrowly avoiding the swat of her hand. "Already? That was fast."_ _

__"I'll get it." Jongin pushes to her feet with startling speed, considering she's been heavily reliant on crutches for the past week._ _

__"Will you sit down and let me handle it?" Taemin scolds, a beat behind her, and then stops in his tracks when he sees Chanyeol at the door. "Oh." His eyes close. _Caught._ _ _

__"I—sorry I didn't call first, I needed to drop off some stuff for—Jongin, hi. Good to see you. I thought you were in London. Did you get home early?" His eyes drop to her conspicuously-wrapped ankle, which might as well be a neon bandage for how much attention it's demanding right now. "Holy shit, what happened to your leg?"_ _

__Jongin stands back, pale-faced and tight-lipped. "Hi, Chanyeol."_ _

__"Sorry," Taemin says quietly, and he's not sure if he's more apologetic towards Chanyeol or Jongin in this moment, because they both look so distraught. The devastation on Jongin's face is plain as day as her composure starts to crumble. Another person in on their secret. The larger the circle, the more likely that the wrong person is going to figure out what's going on with her. They're going to find out that they've been lying about everything._ _

__"What happened to you?" Chanyeol asks again, still standing in the door. "Jongin? Are you okay?"_ _

__"It's a long story," Jongin says. He moves to put his hands on her shoulders but she shies away from him, hugging herself. "Please, don't. I'm fine, it's nothing."_ _

__"I still want to know. It's not nothing—look at you," he insists. Then, to Taemin: "You didn't tell us she was hurt. Why didn't you tell us, we could've come by, or—"_ _

__"Nobody was supposed to know," Taemin says, catching Jongin's eye as she turns away from the door. She's hurting, scrambling to get away from the situation as quickly as she can on an ankle she's supposed to be favoring. "Chanyeol, please, you can't tell anyone about this—nobody's supposed to know that she's still here."_ _

__"Why not?" Chanyeol's forehead creases with concern, watching Jongin slither off to the bedroom at her lumbering speed. "Taemin? What's going on? What happened to her?"_ _

__"Hello!" Mrs. Yong stands at the open door, her arms laden with paper bags stapled shut. "Oh," she says, her face warming with a smile when she sees Chanyeol. "You have company. Good thing I brought extra!"_ _

__—_ _


	6. Chapter 6

"I should have called first," Chanyeol says with an expression on his face that makes him look faintly ill. Taemin ignores him in favor of unpacking the takeout cartons from Mrs. Yong across the kitchen counter, taking his time looking for utensils while he waits for the awkwardness to subside. He's not sure what to tell Chanyeol. Nothing he planned with Jongin involved this, involved someone stopping by his place. It hadn't occurred to him to even—it's not something that happens, ever. Unless.

Unless he's in the middle of debut preparations. Idiot.

"I'm just going to... head out, then, and leave you guys—I'm sorry for interrupting dinner—"

"No, stay," Taemin says, finally forcing himself to look up at Chanyeol's faintly stricken expression. "It's okay." In that moment, he's not sure if he's asking Chanyeol to stay because he's afraid Chanyeol will tell everyone the moment he leaves, or if he's afraid of being alone with Jongin now, but he suddenly, desperately doesn't want Chanyeol to leave just yet.

Chanyeol's got one hand on the door knob, rocked up on the balls of his feet like an unsure child. He glances down the hall to the bedroom, weighing his options. His voice drops. "Taemin," he says, quietly, urgently. "Taemin, what's going on? Why are you keeping this a secret?"

Taemin, too, looks to the hallway, and adjusts his volume accordingly. "Because she asked me to."

"But why—what happened? Is it serious?"

"Yeah. It's—she tore it."

Chanyeol's face has always been an open book and now's no exception. He's got that worried pout, trying to puzzle it out. "Nobody knows? Not even--does Baekhyun know?"

"Just us. Her parents. Mine."

"Is this why you didn't go on your honeymoon?"

It startles Taemin to realize that their entire lie hasn't unraveled; the legitimacy of their marriage remains unquestioned, despite the suspicious timing. He seizes onto this for Jongin's sake. "Well, SE also needs me, so... it just kind of worked out that way."

"Can I talk to her?"

No reason why he can't, now that he knows, Taemin thinks. "Yeah," he says. "Go on. Tell her the food's getting cold."

—

He waits forever. 

It's more like half an hour, but it _feels_ like forever. He watches the clock above the stove, completely unable to bring himself to creep down the hallway to eavesdrop on them. Instead, he busies himself with sampling all of the food Mrs. Yong brought for them. He lingers over the japchae, moodily picking out the bits of beef and slivers of pepper and stuffing them in his mouth without bothering to chew what came before it. Jongin's going to kill him when she comes out and discovers he's practically finished the whole thing without leaving any for her.

The bedroom door rattles. Chanyeol's booming voice grows louder—and—Taemin freezes as Jongin bursts out laughing, the sound ringing through the empty apartment. She's not mad. She's the opposite of mad. She comes inching into view, back on her crutches, now.

"Everything okay?" Taemin asks nervously, gaze volleying between them.

Jongin nods. "Chanyeol was trying to teach me his technique for walking on crutches."

"And?"

"And if I did it his way I'd break my good ankle," she says, beaming up at Chanyeol when he protests. "What? You're hopeless!"

"It just takes some practice!"

"I'll stick with what I know," Jongin says, coming up behind Taemin and leaning her crutches up against the counter. It's automatic, the way that Taemin angles his body to allow for the transfer of her weight from the crutches to his waist, holding her up. 

He puts an arm around her waist. "Really, though. Are you alright?"

"Stop worrying," she murmurs. She smiles, but it doesn't fill her face quite the same way it usually does. She's holding back, the light in her eyes a little dimmer. Taemin can't stand to watch her hide her frustration for Chanyeol's sake. It just seems wrong, the way she laughs a little too hard at things that aren't particularly funny, but if she's determined to push through this evening, then he's not going to make her face it. 

"I'm _starving_ —hey! Taemin!" She's spotted the container of japchae—all noodles, now, no meat left whatsoever.

He grins, covering his mouth with his spare hand to hide the bits of pepper probably still stuck in his teeth. "Sorry?"

She swats him on the chest. "You asshole!"

"There's plenty of food left, quit complaining," Taemin says, placing a smacking kiss on her hairline—mostly to settle her, but also for Chanyeol's benefit. He's standing at the end of the island, arms across his chest, watching them. Taemin needs him to accept this and not try to pick apart the many strands of their lie, at least not yet. He's satisfied with the way Chanyeol smiles, cheeks pink, averting his eyes like he's intruding on a private moment.

Jongin's not looking at Chanyeol though, she's looking up at Taemin, considering him. The corner of her mouth quirks up, just enough for the beginnings of a dimple to form in her cheek. He locks eyes with her for a moment, hoping she understands. He's just selling the marriage. For her benefit.

"Plates?" Jongin asks, tearing her eyes away to direct her question at Chanyeol. "You're staying, right?"

He startles, suddenly hesitant. "I mean, if it's okay—"

"Of course it's okay," she insists, waving her arms at the row of white styrofoam cartons lining the counter. "I can't eat all of this, as much as Taemin would like to see me try."

 

— 

 

"How's she doing?" Chanyeol asks first thing on Monday, his deep puppy-dog brown eyes wide-open and fixed on Taemin. He catches him the moment Taemin arrives and even though they're alone in the front lobby, anyone could walk past at any moment, and anyone could be eavesdropping in the hall. Taemin glances up and shrugs, choosing his words carefully just in case they're not alone.

"About the same. She was asleep when I left." Chanyeol falls in step next to Taemin, following obediently into the elevator. He even punches the button for the fourth floor for him, apparently adamant on following Taemin all the way up to his office

"Can I—is it okay if I visit again? I'll call first this time so it's not a surprise." Chanyeol asks, his words tumbling out all at once, hasty, unchecked. He's as weary as the rest of them after this relentless push to Y KNOT's debut, but it's clear he's been grappling with this revelation since Saturday night. He looks like he hasn't slept a wink. "If she doesn't want me to, that's fine, but I just thought that maybe she'd like some company—when you're not there, I mean, I know she'd rather spend time with _you_ , but—"

"No, I think she'd enjoy the company," Taemin says, and Chanyeol's shoulders droop with relief. "She's probably sick of my face by now."

"She wouldn't have married you if that was a possibility."

Taemin laughs, but secretly feels like he's been smothering her. He's _not_ her husband, so she must be longing for some companionship outside of his company. He hasn't spent this much time with her since high school, and even then they hadn't been sleeping in the same bed or sharing the same living space. 

The elevator comes to a stop. Chanyeol holds open the door so Taemin can get off, but he hangs back, obviously on his way back down to the recording studio in the basement. "So where are you taking your honeymoon? Once she's better, of course."

"Haven't decided yet," Taemin lies, feeling terrible all over again as the elevator doors slide shut. Chanyeol's genuinely concerned for Jongin's welfare and Taemin just knows he's going to feel betrayed when the whole truth comes out.

—

There's always something threatening the delicate balance they're trying to keep. Somehow, they hadn't thought ahead to the logical conclusion of their deception—that it would be difficult to keep under wraps, that there were so many people that will be hurt when she goes back to London. 

He spends his lunch break worrying about what their lie is doing to Jongin, too. It had been her idea, but maybe it should have been his job as her best friend to get her to understand that it would be better in the long run to be honest—to face the scrutiny without the added pressure of pretending to be married to hide her rehab. He'd gone along with it too easily, he realizes. Anything for her. And he'd do it again, but there's just so much at stake—not just for Jongin, but for everyone.

And Baekhyun's persistence is proving to be a problem.

"So," Baekhyun says, slinking into Taemin's office. Taemin startles out of a nap he hadn't intended on taking. "I called London."

"Hm?" Taemin sits up, his shirt damp with sweat, sleep-warm and uncomfortable. He looks around for his phone, which he swears had been on his chest when he dozed off. He'd been in the middle of texting Jongin and his eyes had slipped shut for just a minute—

"I wanted to have flowers sent to Jongin. I saw she had a good review in the paper and wanted to congratulate her, but they said she's here. Her understudy's still dancing the role." Baekhyun frowns. "Is everything okay? You didn't tell me she was back in Seoul. I can't get her on the phone at all these days, she's not even responding to my texts…"

"Yeah," Taemin says quickly. "Everything's fine."

Baekhyun frowns, unsatisfied. "Where is she, then?"

"She was in London to get some clothes and stayed to catch up with her friends. She didn't tell the theatre she was in London because she didn't want them to make her show up for PR events. She'll be back. She just needed a break."

Baekhyun tilts his head. "I can tell when you're not being honest with me, Taemin."

Taemin shrugs, forcing himself to hold eye contact. "I promise, Baekhyun. I'll make sure she calls you soon."

 

—

 

Taemin notices it immediately when Hyunwoo slinks into rehearsal that afternoon, still favoring his left leg. The others seem deliberately preoccupied, freezing like caught rabbits when Taemin calls Hyunwoo aside to have a word with him. He leaves warm-ups to his assistant and brings Hyunwoo back into his office, setting him up on the couch with his leg stretched out in front of him. No popping noises, but a limited range of motion and he winces dramatically when Taemin tries to get him to bend it. There's no way he'll be able to execute the choreography in this state, not without risking further damage.

"You're still hurt," Taemin says, looking up at him. He feels sick inside, his stomach tangling up in knots. It shouldn't have happened on his watch. It shouldn't have happened at all. He's too distracted by everything that's going on at home and he _missed_ it—one of his dancers is hurt. "Did you go back to the dorms last night after Baekhyun finished with you last night, or did you stay behind to practice some more?"

Hyunwoo bows his head to avoid eye contact with Taemin, which means _yes_ , he'd practiced even though he'd been given explicit instructions to rest his knee. It's unsurprising; they're exactly one week away from debut, now. Everyone's maxed out and still striving for more. "It's just sore, hyung," he mutters. 

Jonghyun appears at the door that very moment, his eyes wild with sleep deprivation and something verging on panic. Fuck. Somebody'd told him. Taemin's just glad someone else had been the bringer of bad news because this close to a debut, any bad news and Jonghyun always behaves like—well. Like this. 

"What happened?" Jonghyun barks, all business. "Taemin, what happened? We don't have time for this—why wasn't I told? Why didn't _you_ tell me?"

"His knee. He fell the other day," Taemin says. No point defending himself when his behavior's been pretty indefensible. "We iced it, but he's still feeling some pain."

The stance Jonghyun takes—fist on his forehead, staring up at the ceiling—makes it very clear that he's on the brink of losing it. Taemin's seen him like this a dozen times, each time there's a debut or a comeback. Jonghyun's never, _ever_ folded under the pressure before, but there's a first time for everything. 

"Let me get an assistant to take him to the hospital."

"Can Taemin-hyung take me?" Hyunwoo pipes in. Taemin looks down at him. He's got over a decade on Hyunwoo and normally it doesn't register that he spends his days working with teenagers, but Hyunwoo looks so positively infantile at the moment with his round, babyish cheeks and his pouting mouth. Taemin's amazed he's allowed to cross the street without holding anyone's hand.

"I can do it," Taemin says. "Donggun's got rehearsal covered. They're just running _Love War_ again."

Jonghyun sighs. "We've got to be quiet about this. Someone hears that our trainees are getting hurt and that'll be the only thing anyone remembers about this debut."

"Hyung, I'm fine, I promise!"

Jonghyun cuts a sharp glance at Hyunwoo, silencing him immediately. "I'll make some calls. Get it checked out. I'm not debuting an injured idol."

—

Taemin borrows one of the company vans to make the trip across the city. Fans are waiting out back, but Jonghyun arranges for Jongdae to go out back and distract them long enough for Taemin to bundle Hyunwoo into the backseat, safe at last behind tinted glass, and peel away. Hyunwoo stares at the herd of girls, all his age or a little older, nose pressed against the window even after they've turned the corner.

"Do you think Jonghyun-hyung meant it?" he asks Taemin, his voice small.

"He's worried about you," Taemin says. It isn't an answer to Hyunwoo's question. He doesn't know. He doesn't think Jonghyun would pull Hyunwoo from the line-up, not when they've put so much work into it, but he's not discounting anything when they're a week away from the debut showcase.

"I fell _once_. That's it."

"You've got to be _so careful_ with yourself now, Hyunwoo," Taemin says, adjusting his grip on the steering wheel. He's not going to spill his secret, but he wants to, just to drive his point home. "Once is all it takes, sometimes."

—

It's just bruised. Badly enough that he's sent home with a neoprene brace to sleep in, but the doctor says if he takes it easy for the next few days he can participate in the final dress rehearsals on Friday, as long as he feels up to it. 

Taemin's at the reception desk signing release forms for Hyunwoo when a nurse bustles by. He recognizes her immediately: the nurse who'd helped Jongin out to the car after her procedure. She glances up and smiles at him, eyes warm with familiarity, but doesn't say anything, thank god, thank _god_ , because Hyunwoo chooses that moment to come hobbling around the corner, complaining about missing lunch.

"She was checking you out, hyung," Hyunwoo says in the car later. Taemin lets him believe it because it's easier than explaining. "What's Jongin-noona going to say?"

"She'll never believe it," Taemin says, and buys Hyunwoo some strictly-forbidden fast food with his own money on the way back to Y KNOT's dorms out of a misplaced sense of guilt. It doesn't quite fix everything, but the delighted look on Hyunwoo's face is enough to soften the ache. 

—

When he gets home, Jongin's in the living room. Half a bottle of wine on the table, a full glass in her hand. She's reading something on Taemin's laptop. 

"Chanyeol called me," she says, watching him kick off his shoes. "How's Hyunwoo?"

"Bruised. He'll live," Taemin says, changing the subject because he can't stand to dwell on it any longer. "Have you eaten?"

"Yes," she says. "Come here." She pulls up an article from the Guardian. "Look at this," she says. "A review from my last performance."

So this was the article Baekhyun was talking about earlier. Taemin settles down on the floor next to the couch and skims through it, beaming with pride at the way she's described—masterful, graceful, fluid. A real life fairy. The way this critic writes about her—it sounds like he's fallen in love with her, too. Understandably, of course. It's hard not to watch her perform and _not_ come away with a full-blown infatuation.

"This was from the day it happened," she says, pointing at the date on the page. "I did it right before intermission."

Taemin frowns. "I can't believe you danced on it and didn't tell anyone."

"The show must go on," she says, lifting a shoulder to her ear in half a shrug. Her expression shifts, the minute angles of her mouth slanting unhappily. She's about to say something else when her phone rings.

"If that's Baekhyun, answer it," Taemin says. "He's been bugging me at work. He's really worried about you."

"I know. I'm sorry. He keeps texting me, but I never know what to say and I'm worried he's going to ask me to hang out," Jongin says, peering at the screen. "Oh, it's Benjamin." Jongin's manager back in London. She answers it with a flick of her thumb, putting it on speakerphone instead of holding it to her ear. "Hello?"

"Hello darling, I've just seen the wedding pictures you sent. You looked lovely." Taemin moves to give her some privacy but she stops him with a hand on his forearm. "I've shown everyone, hope you don't mind. We all miss you terribly."

"Thank you," she says, reaching for Taemin's hand. He twines their fingers together comfortably and lets her lean up against his shoulder, the phone booming on speaker between them.

"The article in the Guardian—you were a hit," he says. "I've saved you a few copies, would you like me to mail them along? The address you gave me is still correct?"

"Yes please. Yes—my parents, they'll want to frame them." She laughs, sounding self-conscious.

"Of course. You got my messages over the weekend? About the, erm." There's a violent shuffling of papers on the other end of the line. "The magazine? That wants to do a feature on you, since you're home."

"Yes. Ceci." 

"Ceci, that's the one. No conflicts with the appointment I made for you?"

"No."

"Listen, I hate to pull you away from your handsome young man, but I'm afraid you've got to come back week after next."

Jongin whips her head around to look at Taemin, brow furrowed. "N-no, Ben, I'm taking some personal time off. We agreed."

"Yes, darling, I know, and if there were any way around it... it's the end-of-season gala, you see, and the investors are expecting you to make an appearance. We've been told in no uncertain terms that you _must_ be there. The board members won't take 'no' for an answer. Believe me, I've tried telling them." He lowers his voice, sounding more conversational, like he's sharing a particularly juicy bit of gossip: "Between you and me, attendance has been down since you announced your break. Katrina's lovely, but she doesn't have that magic spark that you do. Go on, can you tell I'm shamelessly buttering you up? Though it's all true."

Taemin covers his mouth with his free hand to stifle his laughter. Benjamin sounds exactly the way Jonghyun does when he's trying to coax a stubborn artist to make an appearance. He sounds absolutely sincere, but it's obvious he's using a strategic battery of compliments to get his way. 

"I can't."

"Can't? Of course you can, love, you can do anything." He pauses. "Would it be easier if I said we had a ticket for your husband? He can certainly come along. In fact, I'd insist. We'd all love to meet the man who swept you off your feet."

Taemin can feel the desperation in the way Jongin squeezes his hand. "He's busy with his job, he's also a dancer, and a choreographer—"

"So you've got a weekend! Just pop back here, put on one of those lovely dresses, shake some hands and say thank you. They're quite taken with you, and we haven't quite met our fundraising goals for next season." He sighs. "Jongin, love, you're usually not this difficult to convince. Is something the matter? You left so quickly, we didn't get a chance to _really_ talk about this sudden wedding of yours. I didn't even know you'd been engaged. It seems there's a lot I don't know."

"I'm fine," she says, and then, to get him off the subject. "I'll come."

"Oh, good, I was beginning to think you were going to make me beg," Benjamin says, and Taemin feels for the guy. It sounds like he deals with a lot of stubborn egos, perhaps as tricky as navigating the management of an idol group. Jongin's not like that, though. Never has been. It's completely out of character for her to behave in such a way to cause distress or more work for others. Her international _reputation_ makes her sound like ballet's girl-next-door, and from what Taemin's read, they're underselling her sweetness.

 

"So you're going back to London?" Taemin asks when Benjamin hangs up. She sighs.

"I'm sorry, I didn't think they were going to make me go back for it. You don't have to come. I'll tell them something came up with Y KNOT, they'll—well they probably won't care, they just want to parade me around. It happens every year."

"Of course I'll come," Taemin says, even though immediately he wonders if Jonghyun will understand, and then decides he doesn't care. "I'm not—are you going to be alright? Walking, I mean."

"I'll have to be," she says, rubbing her ankle as if that'll speed up the healing process. "Can we talk about something else?"

 

They end up splitting the rest of her bottle of wine, and then opening another. Taemin unearths an old DVD of one of her performances back when she was at the Academy in Tokyo, _Don Quixote_. Tucked inside the DVD case is an old picture of Jongin as a teenager, clustered together with a group of dancers—the seven winners of the _Prix de Lausanne_. In the center of them all, sixteen-year-old Jongin, hugging a bouquet of roses as big as she was in her arms.

She came back to school briefly after that, long enough to finish the term's exams, and then she was gone—they'd offered her a spot at the Royal Ballet School, but her parents wanted her closer and sent her to Japan. From there, Australia, then back to Seoul for two years, and then finally, finally: London. Where she'd belonged all along.

Taemin's used to having a long-distance friendship with her. He's not used to getting to see her every day. He feels so lucky to have this time to spend with her, even if there's an expiration date on it and he's killing himself burning the candle at both ends. He'll take what he can get, greedy, and still want more time.

Taemin puts in the DVD and she leans back against him, pointing at the screen. "Look," she says, like she doesn't even realize he can't take his eyes away from her when she performs. She's magical. She steals the stage and commands everyone's attention. It would have been a foregone conclusion to him, knowing nothing about her, if he watched her dance. She's been a star since day one.

He looks, but not at her performance. Instead he's wine-drunk and focused on the tapered line of her neck and the tiny, delicate diamonds adorning her ear lobes. The loose hair from her ponytail. She smiles up at him, similarly drunk and unobservant besides. She doesn't seem to notice he's been staring at her this whole time. Her eyes crinkle at the corners, curved into perfect crescents.

"Terrible," she says, and the spell is broken.

"What? That was amazing."

"No, it was awful. I always hated this one," she says, scratching the side of her nose with some self-consciousness. "I looked so heavy. Never got enough height."

"You got a standing ovation," Taemin says, getting ready to rewind it back to her solo. She stops him.

"Oh _god,_ " she says when it pauses, frozen on the male lead's face. Young, angular. Hidden under a pound of white pancake makeup. "That's—what's his name. I'd forgotten about him."

"You've forgotten the name of your _first kiss_?" Taemin demands, grinning. "Poor Eijiro."

She rears back, scandalized at his memory. "You remember?"

"Of course." She'd written him about her first kiss ad nauseam, some Japanese guy who had the role opposite her, who kissed her half a dozen times in the wings and then grew bored with her. Taemin had felt hotly protective at the time, furious that he could cast Jongin aside so easily when everything was so new to Jongin, when everything meant more because it was first, and therefore special.

"That's truly creepy."

"The number of times you mentioned him in your letters, I was starting to think you had a new best friend."

She guffaws. "Was this the same time you were hanging out with—what was her name. Naeun. The one who ended up confessing she was actually in love with Taesun and only wanted to come over to your house so she could see him."

Taemin rubs his eyes tiredly. "Wow. I haven't thought about _her_ since I graduated from high school. You want to talk about truly creepy?"

"See," Jongin says, grinning. "We've been friends too long, Taemin. Am I the keeper of your memories, now?"

"Somebody's got to do it. I'm too busy remembering all of your gentleman callers." He leans back against the arm of the couch. There's a crick in his neck but he's comfortable like this anyway, sharing body heat with Jongin under the blanket she'd tugged over her shoulders.

She smiles. "Nobody lately, though."

"Why is that?" he asks cautiously, not really wanting an honest answer. It's stupid to feel jealous of men he's never met, over a woman he's only pretending to be married to. Regardless, he's protective of her and there's always an irritated prickle under his skin every time some lousy guy comes along and doesn't realize how lucky he is.

"Haven't met anyone worth my time," she says, her voice soft. "Too busy."

"Mmm."

"It's nice to get hugs from you whenever I want, now," she continues. "I wish you didn't live so far away from me the rest of the year."

"You're the one who left, not me."

"I know. But still." She yawns. "I'm just saying. Besides the ankle thing, it's nice. I missed you too much."

He gathers her close as if to prove a point, squeezing her just a little too tightly until she starts to protest. "Me, too," he agrees. "Not that I'm happy you're hurt, but I'm glad you came back."

"I promise I won't stay away so long. When I leave, I mean," she says, and it hits Taemin that she _will_ be leaving someday, as soon as she can dance again. Of course he's been thinking about it, but it feels like a horrible reality when she says it out loud. He feels like shit for the split second he wishes it were different. It's her first love, and he'd be the worst husband—the worst _best friend_ in the world—if he ever even thought to keep her from it. A world without Kim Jongin on stage is a waste. She was born to dance. 

Nothing else matters.

—


	7. Chapter 7

Jonghyun wakes Taemin up before dawn the morning teasers are due to drop. "What am I doing?" he says the minute Taemin answers the phone, bypassing _hello_ and starting in immediately with the existential angst. This pattern between them is so familiar that Taemin doesn't even need to ask him what's wrong. He's gotten enough of these phone calls since he came back to work for Jonghyun; he knows. Nothing's _really_ wrong.

Taemin falls back against his pillows, careful to speak in a hushed voice to avoid disturbing Jongin.

"You're bothering me, that's what you're doing." Taemin's used to Jonghyun's crises by now. They never last longer than a couple of days, and he's been remarkably put together through this entire debut process—completely unlike Violet Flashlight's debut, during which Taemin changed his number _twice_ because the late night calls had come so frequently—so Taemin figures that Jonghyun is due a minor meltdown before it's too late.

"What if this isn't the sound the public's looking for right now? What if we've missed the mark entirely?"

"We haven't missed the mark. The song's tight," Taemin says, rolling over and cupping his hand over his mouth. "You've got the best team in the industry behind your groups, Jonghyun. You made sure of that. So, if this debut fails, it's because they're not working hard enough to sell it."

"Oh god, you said it. You said they're going to fail. You said it out loud."

"That's not what I said at all."

Taemin doesn't need to be in the same room with Jonghyun to know what he's doing now, pressing the heels of his hands into his eye sockets. "Oh, god," he wails. "We're not ready. They're not ready."

"Jonghyun. Breathe. We've been ready—" 

"What's happening?" Jongin croaks from her side of the bed. Taemin freezes.

"Shit."

"What?" Jonghyun asks.

"I—it's nothing, hold on." He holds the phone against his chest and looks over at Jongin. She's lifting her head off the pillow, face scrunched unhappily at the abrupt way she'd been woken up. "Hey," he says, voice softening. "I'm sorry I woke you, it's just Jonghyun."

"Is he okay?"

"He's—you know how he is."

"He's freaking out." 

Taemin nods. "I'm sorry. I'll take this in the living room. Go back to sleep."

"No, give it to me," she says, reaching for the phone. "You suck at this. Let me talk to him. Jonghyun?"

Taemin lies back against the pillows and listens to Jongin whispering to Jonghyun, so quiet that he can't make out what she's saying. Still, he knows she's better at soothing Jonghyun than he's ever been—his impulse to turn everything into a joke is a double-edged sword he's constantly struggling with. Jongin's sincerity is overwhelming, the way she says what she means, sweetly and without pretense.

"They're very good, Jonghyun. I can't believe they're rookies," she says. "Your groups always look so polished. No, I won't pass on that compliment to Taemin. He doesn't need to hear anyone else tell him how talented he is."

Jonghyun's laughter rings brightly through the receiver, and that's how Taemin knows that Jongin has gotten through to him, eased his fears, just like that. Taemin fumbles to extract his arm from under the covers, finds Jongin's free hand and squeezes it. _Thank you._ She squeezes back twice and doesn't let go after.

"Yes, I'll try to come. Of course. I miss you too. I won't tell you to go back to sleep because I know you won't," she says. "Congratulations, Jonghyun. Really."

She whispers a brief goodbye and hangs up before she returns the phone to Taemin. 

"What time is it?" she asks after a pause, already sounding half-asleep again. She fidgets for a moment, trying to get comfortable against the pillows again.

Taemin glances at his phone's screen and tosses it aside. "After four."

"I didn't realize how much I've really missed it here," she says, her voice creaky and quiet in the dark. "He hasn't changed a bit."

"No, he hasn't. Still as dramatic as he's ever been," Taemin agrees. 

"It's good that he's like that, though," Jongin says, snuggling closer to Taemin, her voice drowsy and slow in his ear. "To care about something as much as if it was the first time, even when it's not. To me, when something becomes too routine to pay attention to the details—that's when you fail."

"When did you start sounding like Confucius?" Taemin ponders, expecting the kick in the shins before it lands. He doesn't shy away from it.

"Why are you making fun of me?" she demands. "You're exactly the same way. That's why the two of you make such a great team."

Jonghyun had been one of the first industry people Taemin had met, back when Jonghyun was contracted as a solo artist under SE's umbrella and Taemin was brand new to a career under a management company, dancing backup for KISS-INC's second tour. Jonghyun was friends with some of the younger KISS-INC members and used to hang around practices for hours on end, watching everything with a meticulous eye, often times better at constructive criticism than their coach—in retrospect, definitely a clear indication that Jonghyun was meant for something greater than a half-neglected solo career stymied by SE's old management.

At the time, KISS-INC had been the most popular idol group and it wasn't long before Taemin was getting noticed, too. Not by the KISS-INC fans, but by SE's management, who saw potential in the scrawny, unpolished, 17-year-old Taemin and allowed him to spend more time at their building after hours, working with the company's staff choreographer, learning how to put it together by himself.

For a while it seemed like Taemin's path was set. He liked the work, and the creative management team believed in his abilities enough to hand over the reins for KISS-INC's comeback. It was the summer Taemin graduated from high school, and Jongin was away in Japan, and he was suddenly faced with the prospect of a long, illustrious career for one of South Korea's biggest entertainment companies. He was even generating a little industry buzz of his own—Lee Taemin, prodigy, dancing king, wunderkind. The kid single-handedly changing the direction of K-pop's future, maybe. Everything seemed perfect. 

But it was too good to be true, and it didn't last. KISS-INC's eleven members began aging into their military service, one or two at a time, and Taemin's work was sidelined in favor of other projects. They'd call him for music shows, to fill in a gap, to be a place-holder for another body, but he wasn't being challenged anymore, wasn't being given opportunities to show off his real talent.

So it wasn't surprising to anyone that Taemin had one foot out the door back then. He used to complain to Jongin, loudly and at length, every night after he got home from rehearsals for things that didn't matter and weren't going to see the light of day. Taemin was itching for something new. He spent a lot of time with one of the other KISS-INC dancers, Moonkyu, who was similarly disillusioned by the way they'd been cast aside. Entering a company without becoming an idol—steady, paid work without the pressures of fame—it was everything Taemin thought he'd wanted. Except once he had it, it wasn't anything like he'd hoped. He wasn't being given new opportunities. He wasn't allowed to work with other groups, or with any of the solo projects from KISS-INC. He felt washed up, and he was barely pushing 22.

Other companies could smell the blood in the water and they were courting him, openly, sometimes, but insistently either way. They'd been impressed with the work he did on KISS-INC's 5th anniversary tour—he'd handled the artistic direction all by himself, at the age of 20—but his overdeveloped sense of loyalty kicked in at the worst moments. He couldn't do that to SE, not when they'd given him a chance when no one else was interested. Even if he was disgruntled, they were like family to him. If he couldn't work for SE and find satisfaction in his career and his growth as an artist, he'd work for himself. Set his own terms. Work with his own crew. He'd never go back to being on staff for another company again. 

Or so he thought.

He'd been the one to suggest the studio. Moonkyu was all too eager to get out from under SE's thumb, and his contract was up for renewal as well, so they pooled their money together and rented a tiny space out near the river. Back then it was the two of them, but Taemin's reputation and Moonkyu's magnetic personality meant that the studio grew to a crew of a couple dozen within a few months. 

Jongin was back in Seoul by then, and she used to come by after rehearsals, usually with Sehun in tow, and the two of them would join in. Didn't matter how tired they were, they were always game. Jongin threw herself especially hard into it, almost like she was trying to impress Taemin enough for a permanent spot. He'd have given her one— _gladly_ —but London wanted her more, and so she went.

SE's CEO Shin died suddenly, about a year after Taemin's studio opened its doors. Taemin was so out of touch with the people from his former life that he didn't hear a thing about it until Jonghyun showed up one night and watched a whole run through from the back of the room, arms folded across his chest, his eyes alight with excitement. He looked like a proud father, almost, and he stuck around until long after everyone else had gone home, waiting for Taemin out in the parking lot, to pitch him an opportunity: come back to SE.

_I'm in charge now_ , he told Taemin. _The board is giving me a shot. I know you weren't happy with how Shin was running things but the truth is—you were right. We haven't had a hit in years and it's because they've been recycling the old formula. But the scene's changed. We need something different._

_What does that have to do with me?_ Taemin asked. _I quit SE. The board won't hire me back._

_The board has nothing to do with it. I'm hiring you. You're the best man for the job._

_I don't want the job._

_You'll have free rein. Think of this like a reboot. The best of both worlds. You've got access to the reputation and resources of a top-tier company with the freedom from expectations of a boutique one. What's there to think about?_

Taemin laughed at him. _You're crazy. Freedom from expectations? How long do you think the investors are going to tolerate your experiment before they hire someone like Shin?_

_Do you trust me? You always used to._ A low blow. _Come. Meet the girls I want to debut._

_A girl group? SE hasn't ever had one._

_I know. High time we change that, don't you think? Look. Come and work with them, I'll pay you for your time. And if, after that, you'd rather stay here, then I respect that decision and I won't bother you again._

Jonghyun had been confident—and spot-on. Violet Flashlight debuted a year later, Taemin in the wings by Jonghyun's side. It's been that way ever since. 

Some days, though, Taemin misses the studio. It's been months since he's been able to get back. He still pays his share of the rent and his name is still on the door, but he feels disconnected from the path he'd been prepared to take. Who knows where he'd be if he'd turned the offer down. 

Jonghyun would be the only person in the world who could convince Taemin to come back to the industry life after he'd left it. Jonghyun was sweet and warm, brightly enthusiastic, a dedicated manager and friend, strong but sensitive. He was an exceptional boss, Taemin thought privately, although it was much easier to tease Jonghyun and drive him crazy than to be sincere. 

The fact that every debut and every comeback keeps Jonghyun up at night—Jongin's right. It's a testament to just how much he gives a shit. Jonghyun truly cares about his artists. Not just the numbers they deliver, not the year-end awards, not even the sales records (although he'd yet to deliver a misstep—his track record was immaculate). He pushed for all of those things, asked for everyone to do their best to achieve and surpass, but never at the expense of the health and well-being of his artists. And he went to the mat for artists when misunderstandings arose in the tabloids.

Taemin wonders how far Jonghyun's loyalty goes, if there is a point, but no further. Taemin wonders if the loyalty extends to lies about marriage. He wonders if this will test Jonghyun's patience to the point where it breaks. He wonders if his stunt with Jongin is beyond that point, lightyears away, too far to come back from what he's done. What they've both done.

"I'm glad you're working with him again," Jongin says, like she'd _known_ that's exactly what Taemin was thinking. 

"Me too. Even if he drives me crazy."

"You love it. You love him."

"I do," Taemin says. "I owe my career to him giving me another chance."

"You would have found another way to be amazing," Jongin says, rolling over back to her side of the bed. She smothers a yawn with the back of her hand. "He just recognized how brilliant you were before somebody else snatched you up."

—

 

Taemin tries to go back to sleep after that but he's wide awake and ready for the day, now. Teasers are due to drop in a few hours, but the internet's already buzzing in anticipation of _CEO JJONG-NIM'S NEWEST BOYBAND!!!!!!_. He scrolls through the search engines on his phone and then abandons that in favor of a quick, scalding hot shower.

Jongin's waiting for him in the living room when he emerges, sitting in the middle of the rug in an oversized sweatshirt (his) and a pair of leggings (definitely not his). He stumbles into the kitchen with his wet hair dripping down the back of his neck, still rubbing at his eyes. Somehow, he manages to turn the kettle on to make some instant coffee and leans against the counter for support.

"When do the teasers go live?" Jongin asks him, rolling into a perfect split. He catches the grimace that flickers across her face. She's pushing herself too hard again.

"Noon. What are you doing?"

She looks up at him, her glasses slipping down the bridge of her nose. "I'm stretching. What does it look like?"

"Like you're dislocating both hips."

"You should stretch more, Taemin. Come on, get down here and stretch with me. You can help."

He eyes her suspiciously, digging around in the cabinet for a mug instead. "No, thanks. Are you sure you should be doing that yet? Shouldn't you wait until your doctor clears you for activity?"

"It's just stretching."

"Still. I saw you limping yesterday. Take it easy today. Put it up. Spend the day on the couch watching dramas. Ice it."

"If I don't start trying to use it, it'll never get better," she says matter-of-factly. "I feel fine. I know my body."

She bends all the way to the right, hands wrapped around the sole of her foot, and touches her forehead to her knee. Taemin winces. It looks painful. He's never been as flexible as Jongin. The few times she'd tried to get him to do some basic ballet steps, his ankle slipped off the bar, his back and his hips too stiff. It was strange, having his body betray him in ways it never had before, and it wasn't an experience he was keen to repeat. He'll leave the ballet to Jongin. She's so, so much better at it anyway.

He opens his mouth to argue, decides against it, and takes a long swig of his coffee instead. 

"If I can show them how much progress I made on my own, maybe I can get started with my physical therapy already."

He lifts a shoulder, keeping the mug to his lips. He doesn't want to sound like a nag, not when she's so insistent on recovering as quickly as possible. Truthfully, he can't imagine how frustrated she must be. It's been a month since the accident and she hasn't danced since. He'd be losing his mind by now.

"If I want to be back for next season, I need to start getting back into shape soon," she says.

"What—have you—I mean." He stops and puts his mug in the sink while he tries to gather his thoughts. He has to choose his words carefully or he'll upset her, and he doesn't want to upset her. "Okay," he says instead, leaving the argument alone. "I've got to go. Do you need anything before I leave?"

She shakes her head, switching to her left side. He watches her gingerly wrap a hand around the base of her bad foot, bowing into herself, her back a perfect arch. She looks lovely. You'd hardly be able to tell she was hurt, if you didn't know any better. Maybe she's right; maybe she'll be back in London, on stage, in no time.

He turns away before she can catch him staring.

 

— 

Taemin arrives through the front doors of SE's building that morning, just so he can stop in the lobby and watch SE's promotional video looping on the flat screen television mounted across from the receptionist's desk. Taemin's even in there for a few frames, a split second glimpse at a rehearsal, set to an instrumental of Violet Flashlight's last single. This time tomorrow, Y KNOT's teasers will be up there instead.

"Oh. You're here," Soojung says, appearing out of thin air—or from around the corner, Taemin's not entirely sure. "Why didn't you come in through the back?"

She's dolled up this morning, her long hair falling pin-straight to the small of her back. She's got a pair of high-waisted trousers on and a blazer with the sleeves rolled up over a crop top. She could easily pass for an idol herself, if she cared to swap out her ripped white sneakers for a pair of heels.

"You look nice," Taemin says suspiciously. "Am I forgetting something? Your birthday? Do you have an interview? Are you leaving?"

"Will you shut up," she says crossly, following him into the elevator and punching the bright red 2 button with enough force to bruise her knuckle. "That's how rumors get started. No, I just had time, for once. I used to dress like this all the time before I needed the sleep."

"Well. You look good."

The elevator shudders to a stop on the second floor. "I always look good. You—look like you just rolled out of bed five minutes ago. Seriously, Taemin, when was the last time you did laundry?"

"And you're modest, too," he says, waiting for her to step off the elevator before he follows her. "These clothes are clean." He sniffs himself. "I'm pretty sure."

A few of the girls from Violet Flashlight filter past on their way to rehearsal. Ivy, the leader, waves at Taemin on her way past. She's swimming in an oversized warm-up jacket three sizes too big for her and her hair's dyed a bright mermaid teal for the music video they're shooting next week. 

"Taemin-oppa! I'm mad at you! You didn't invite us to your wedding," she says, her voice bright and loud even at this ungodly hour.

"You brat," Taemin says, laughing. "Why would I invite you to my wedding?"

"Because—I'm going to invite you to mine!"

"Decades from now, I'm going to hold you to that."

Eunji, Violet Flashlight's maknae, and Ivy's best friend, comes bouncing up next to her. "Oppa, when are you going to have kids?"

Ivy wrinkles her nose. "Ooh, Taemin-oppa would be such a scary dad."

"Scary?" Taemin says, indignantly. "What do you mean _scary_?"

Soojung laughs. "You'd feed the baby convenience store ramen and you'd forget where you put it every time to put it down. Poor thing."

"I can't imagine you as a dad," Eunji echoes. 

"He can barely take care of himself," Soojung confirms, moving off to leave the cluster of girls and Taemin gathered in the hallway.

"Shut up, all of you," Taemin says. "And don't you guys have a rehearsal you're late for?"

"Oppa, when are you coming back?" Eunji asks. "I'm tired of Donggun. He's no fun."

He laughs, but secretly he's not sure he has an answer for her. Violet Flashlight's just been announced for a multi-city tour across Asia at the end of the year. At the last staff meeting, Jonghyun floated the idea of giving the entire thing to Taemin. It'd be a lot of hard work and very long hours, but Taemin enjoys working with them and feels like he's got a vested interest in their continued success, since they were his first group after he came back to SE.

But now, every opportunity comes with additional considerations, voice in the back of his head he can't ignore: _what will Jongin say? Will she be better by then? Will she need me?_

"I hope I'll be back soon. Maybe your next next comeback. But hey, I like your hair," he says instead of giving a definite answer, tugging on Ivy's ponytail. "Very cool."

"Jonghyun-oppa says I look like an ice cream cone," she says.

“I’m sure he meant it in a nice way," Taemin says.

"I like ice cream. I wasn't offended," she says, bouncing on the balls of her feet excitedly. "How's Y KNOT?"

"You tell me. Haven't you spoken to Jaehyun?"

She rolls her eyes. "No."

And as though he knew he was the topic of conversation, Ivy's younger brother Jaehyun comes around the corner with Hyunwoo sleepily trailing behind him.

"Hey. Jerk," she says, swiping at Jaehyun when he passes. Having her baby brother follow in her footsteps had taken some adjusting on her part, especially when he bypassed the four years she spent training. He’s been in the company for less than a year and he’s debuting.

"Hey yourself," he says rudely. "You need to call Mom. She's mad that you ignored her calls last night. She took it out on me instead."

"I was busy." She rolls her eyes. "Fine. I'll call her later."

Hyunwoo comes out from hiding behind Jaehyun and bows six or seven times in rapid succession. "Hi," he says very politely, very quietly, too shy to make eye contact with Ivy or Eunji. He's been that way since the day he entered the company. Hyunwoo seems to have the most trouble assimilating with celebrity. He's good—incredibly, incredibly talented, with the potential to be one of the most well-rounded performers in the company as long as he worked hard at it, if you asked Taemin's opinion—but he seems to hold himself separately from the kids he's performing with. It's not an ego thing, not with Hyunwoo, but more of a case of impostor syndrome, as though he's standing at the edge and feels as though he doesn't quite belong there and he's waiting for somebody to notice and throw him out. Taemin's seen hundreds of kids come through over the years and Hyunwoo belongs, absolutely, most certainly.

"I like your song," Ivy offers kindly, ignoring her brother outright now. She's always been very good with the younger kids—Jaehyun excluded, for obvious reasons—and even though she's only got five years on Hyunwoo, that's a lifetime of experience when it comes to performance.

"Please look after us," he says, bowing again, and she smiles.

"Good luck! We'll be at your showcase," Ivy says, and then immediately undermines her sweetness by sticking her tongue out at Jaehyun when Hyunwoo scuttles away.

 

— 

 

Eric's in a particularly foul mood this morning when he comes into Studio C after his voice lesson. "Jonghyun-hyung made me shut down my Instagram," he says when Taemin finally gives in to the sulking and pulls him into the hallway to ask him what's up. His focus is off and he keeps scowling into the distance, arms folded across his chest.

"Shut it down?"

"Well, lock it," Eric amends. "And delete a lot of my pictures. And the videos of me singing. I had thousands of likes on them."

"Trust me, it's better that way," Taemin says. "Delete everyone you don't know personally. Change your username. Don't let fans find it."

"Do I ever get to have a public one again?" Eric asks, clearly aghast at the idea of losing the attention he's been getting for years now. He'd been a minor Youtube celebrity back in America before he was accepted to be a trainee here. He's still having some trouble adjusting to the idea of letting the company speak for him. 

"If you're good."

Eric's frown deepens. "What does good mean?"

"It means if I catch you screwing up your footwork one more time, I'm making you stay late tonight," Taemin says. "You're supposed to be the leader, remember? So lead. You have more important things you need to be thinking about right now."

Eric huffs. "That's what Jonghyun-hyung says. I _am_ leading."

"Then lead by example and fix your attitude," Taemin says, not unkindly. "Even if you're frustrated, your mood reflects on them. Trust me, I know it's hard. Be positive, and if something is bothering you, come talk to me or Jonghyun—or Baekhyun, or anyone. And don't add to Jonghyun-hyung's stress by whining to him about SNS. Minjae had to delete his Cyworld, and he didn't complain."

"Aw, hyung, come on. Nobody uses those anymore anyway."

"You'll be surprised what people will dig up. Just be careful, okay? Protect yourself. Fans will take whatever you give them. Make sure you keep parts of you for yourself. It's okay to treat this like a job and have a life separate from _Eric, leader of Y KNOT_."

"But that's who I want to be," Eric says.

"Hey. Punk. Don't be in such a rush to break all the rules at once," Taemin says, finally. "You'll learn how to balance the company's reputation and your group's reputation with your life. I promise. But learn how to do it right, first, so you don't make huge mistakes. Learn where the pitfalls are. And don't damage your group's reputation. It's not just you anymore, it's all of them—and all of us, too. You've spent a lot of time on this. Years. It's not worth throwing away for anything or anyone."

 

—

 

Baekhyun knocks on the door to Taemin's office at half-past eleven, and then lets himself in without waiting for permission.

"Hey," he says. "Jonghyun asked to see us."

Taemin looks up from his laptop and pauses the recording he's been watching, the last run-through from the 9AM rehearsal. It's Hyunwoo's first day back dancing and Taemin's watching the playback like a hawk for any signs of pain or weakness in his knee.

"Did he say why?"

"No, just said he needed me to come get you. He said now, so… let's go."

Taemin feels strange, suddenly—on edge, guilty, like maybe he's about to be scolded for something. "How's his mood?"

"Teasers drop in half an hour. How do you _think_ his mood is? He's a basket case."

Taemin rises, the dread in his stomach heavy enough to slow his movements. Baekhyun misinterprets this as exhaustion and claps him on the shoulder encouragingly.

"Don't worry. He's fired me three times this morning already. I'm still here."

Jonghyun's waiting for them with his office door wide open, sitting at his desk with his chin in his hands. He looks exhausted. He probably hadn't slept at all—before or after—he called Taemin. Chanyeol's there, holding a box of pastries from the trendy new _boulangerie_ down the block. 

"Hyung? You wanted to see us?"

"Yeah, take a seat," he says, waving over at the couch on the far wall. "Just waiting for—"

"Hey, you're not starting without me, are you?"

Taemin jerks around wildly at the sound of Jongin's voice. She's rounding the corner, bottle of champagne in hand, a sleeve of clear plastic cups tucked under her left arm. Her gait is slow but he can tell she's taking great care to walk as steadily as possible to avoid rousing suspicion. The others aren't looking for the signs that are so obvious to him—the stiffness in her foot in her soft, slip-on sneakers, or the mechanical way her hips move. He wants to tell her to sit down. She smiles at him so sweetly and waves the bottle of champagne at him with an expression that looks a lot like triumph.

"Look! It's my amazing husband!" she calls. His cheeks flush, unused to being greeted like that.

"We'd never start without you," Jonghyun says, rescuing the champagne and the cups from her grasp just in time for Baekhyun to pull her into an aggressive, one-armed hug. "You're the guest of honor. Glad you could make it."

"Of course, I wouldn't miss this," she says, finally catching the way Taemin's staring at her. She grins at him over Baekhyun's shoulder, her eyes bright. "Hi, you. Surprise."

"Hi? Not that I'm sad to see you, but what the hell are you doing here?"

"You guys have been working really hard, and I wanted to come by and celebrate that. Quickly, of course, because I know you still have a lot to do today."

"You didn't tell me you were coming by, I could have picked you up—"

"That would have ruined the surprise, then," she says, stepping away from Baekhyun. "Hi, Chanyeol. I missed you!"

"Good to see you, Jongin! How are you feeling?"

Taemin cuts a menacing look in Chanyeol's direction. Chanyeol, to his credit, realizes his mistake the minute the words come out of his mouth and crams an entire chocolate croissant in there before he accidentally says anything else. 

"Feeling? Are you sick?" Baekhyun asks. "Is that why you were ignoring my calls?"

"I'm just jetlagged," Jongin says without skipping a beat. "I wasn't ignoring you. Time zones, lots to do, you know how it is."

"I don't," he says. His frown softens into a wry little smirk. He can never stay annoyed at anyone for very long, it's just not in his nature. "Some of us only live in one city at a time, you jetsetter."

Jonghyun pops the cork on the champagne bottle and steps back just in time for a cascade of foam to slop on his new sneakers, narrowly missing the stacks of paperwork and the brand new MacBook Pro on his desk. Chanyeol dives for the box of tissues and does his best to clean up the mess while Jonghyun passes out carefully poured cups of champagne.

"Come on, hyung," Baekhyun complains, upset with the portion—a mouthful, maybe two at best. "Don't be stingy."

"I'm not covering for you when you get sloppy," Jonghyun says. "Thank you to Jongin, we're happy to have you back home with us."

"I can't believe you surprised us like this," Taemin says. "You usually tell me everything you're planning." 

She shrugs. "You send me flowers for every single one of my opening nights. Isn't this basically the same thing?" 

He laughs, a little embarrassed at being on the receiving end of her attention in front of everyone. He doesn't know why. Nothing's supposed to be different, and she's always talked to him like this, but still. "Sure, I guess."

"So I'm proposing a toast," Jongin says, giggling a little self-consciously at the sudden solemn hush in Jonghyun's tiny office. "To Jonghyun, who knows how to bring the best out of everyone. May Y KNOT's debut be a huge success." 

"Hear, hear!" Chanyeol booms, smashing his plastic cup against Baekhyun's and Taemin's cups so hard that champagne sloshes over his hand. Jonghyun sits smiling to himself, perched on the edge of his desk, looking a little shy.

"I'm nothing without these guys," he murmurs, bringing the rim of his cup up to his lips. His voice sounds muffled, hollow and plastic. He's clearly trying his best not to cry in front of everyone. "Thank you for all of your hard work. And thank you, Jongin, for the distraction, but. Teasers are live in—" He checks his watch. "Seven minutes."

"That's my cue to exit," she says, handing Taemin her empty cup. "Break a leg, guys." 

Baekhyun stops her at the door with an exaggerated pout. "Jongin. Don't be mean, get lunch with me before you go."

"Oh, I, uh—I'm not sure, Taemin?" She looks back at Taemin, her expression unreadable. Taemin isn't sure which answer she wants him to give, so he wings it.

"Go," Taemin says. "Maybe he'll stop bothering me about you."

Jongin pats his face affectionately. "Didn't you realize? Marrying me means you're also my personal assistant, now. That'll never stop." She drops from his face to his hip, reaching into his back pocket with practiced ease. She has his crushed pack of cigarettes in hand before he realizes what's happening.

"Hey," he says, switching gears, trying to get them back. "Don't leave with those."

She holds them out of his reach. "I'm going out for a smoke with Chanyeol. I'll come back after I get lunch with Baekhyun."

"You want me to come?"

She smiles. "I always do, but I think Jonghyun needs you."

"Mmm. I'm in trouble."

"That's not a shock at all. You probably deserve it." She squeezes his elbow as she passes. "I'll see you later."

"You two are so cute," Jonghyun says while Jongin's certainly still within earshot. "I'm happy you found the only woman crazy enough to put up with you, Lee Taemin."

"Hey, what's that supposed to mean?"

"It means you're ridiculous, but so's she. I'd say you're pretty evenly matched."

Taemin nods and rubs the back of his neck, unsure of what to say to that. It's true, but is Jonghyun going to feel weird after their 'divorce'—is he going to be upset with Jongin? With Taemin? With the both of them?

"What's up, hyung?" he asks instead. "Did you need something? Rehearsal went well, Hyunwoo's knee looks good, I think we're in good shape for Saturday."

"Good," Jonghyun says, still sitting on his desk instead of in his chair. He sets his cup aside. "Look, I know you've got a lot on your plate right now, and we're two days away from Y KNOT's showcase, but I just wanted to see what your August looks like."

"My—August? I don't know yet. Why?"

"The Violet Flashlight tour. I know we talked about it earlier, and I just wanted you to know, I was serious—I want to give it to you. But if you're—I don't know what your plans are. With Jongin, I mean. And so I just need to know if I can count on you."

Taemin's taken aback. August is a few months down the road, but if Jongin's recovery slows down or stalls out—she might still need his assistance and the cover of their marriage in order to hide her physical therapy. But even if that's the case… she could be here for that, he supposes. He could still agree to it. And if she's up and walking on her ankle, surprising him at the office, going for lunch with Baekhyun—it can't be that bad. Her positive attitude towards her recovery must be working.

Jonghyun watches him hesitate. "I thought this might happen. Not that I'm not happy for you, but—you know me, Taemin, I'm selfish. I like it when you're working for me. You make me look good."

"I'm not quitting, hyung—" Taemin begins, feeling a little panicked. "I'm not—I want the tour. I'm sorry, I'm just a little distracted by Y KNOT. I can do it."

"You're sure?" Jonghyun says, sounding relieved. "And what about Jongin? Are you two living apart during her season in London?"

"We… yeah, she'll be back in London by then." Taemin says, anxiously twisting the ring around his finger.

"Well," Jonghyun says, rising to his feet. "Then I hope she can take some time out of her busy schedule to come and watch your show. I just know it's going to be great."

"Yeah, great," Taemin echoes faintly, still fiddling with his wedding ring. 

"Of course. You've more than earned the opportunity to have a show of your own again," Jonghyun says, and then pauses. "You've never once let me down, Taemin. I hope you know how much I appreciate that."

"I do," Taemin says, feeling ill, because he knows that's about to change permanently in the very near future. "Thanks, hyung."

—


	8. Chapter 8

Taemin doesn't go home the night before the showcase. There's too much to be done and as much as he wants to go back and see Jongin, he can't justify the commute time for three hours of relaxation. Jongin has dinner delivered to his office, and then coffee the following morning. 

_u don't need to feed me,_ he texts her when the delivery guy shows up first thing after daybreak with a cardboard tray of coffee cups. _craft services is taking care of me. what about u?_

She doesn't say what she's doing for breakfast, or what she's even doing awake at 6 in the morning, but she does reply _break a leg ❤︎❤︎❤︎_ and somehow it's better at waking him up than the coffee.

 _ur coming to the showcase right?_ he texts, jamming his feet into his sneakers without bothering to undo the laces. _after ur appointment?_

_wouldn't miss it! ❤︎_

She's relying heavily on the heart emoji this morning and it's flustering Taemin more than he'd expected. Should he be replying back with hearts, or… what? Chanyeol knocks on the door before Taemin can compose a response that doesn't sound completely idiotic.

"Hey," Chanyeol says quietly, his voice scratchy and tired. He's squinting a little, like the fluorescent lights are bothering his eyes. "You sleep here too?"

"How could you tell?"

"You're wearing the same thing you were wearing last night," Chanyeol says, smothering a yawn with the back of his hand. "Kyungsoo went home and keeps texting me pictures of himself in bed with the dogs. I'm so jealous I'm tempted to break up with him for the next week so I don't have to be reminded of what I'm missing."

"Putting him on Do Not Disturb is probably better for your relationship long-term. Jongin sent coffee," Taemin says, and points at the tray of four to-go cups on his piano. "Have one. I could drink it all myself, but I probably shouldn't."

"Fuck, yes," Chanyeol says eagerly, snatching up the one nearest to him with both hands. "She looked good yesterday, by the way. Is she—her recovery's going well?"

"That's what she tells me. She has an appointment today, and then she's coming to the showcase, so I guess we'll know more soon," Taemin says, following Chanyeol out into the hallway. They've got a press conference at 1, followed by the showcase, and he really needs to double-check on everyone, especially Hyunwoo.

"I'm sorry about yesterday, by the way," Chanyeol says. "Kyungsoo always tells me I've got a big mouth."

"You were concerned, it's okay. I don't think anybody noticed," Taemin says. "She seemed to handle it fine."

"She did," Chanyeol agrees. "Anyway, thanks for the coffee. You coming down to the studio?"

"Uh, yeah. I'll be right there," Taemin says, hanging back long enough to pull his phone out of his pocket. _wish i could come w/ u today. i'll be thinking abt u. lmk how it goes ❤︎ see u soon_ he types, and hits send, already dying a little inside at the inclusion of the heart, but he doesn't know how to soften it into something that means _i am concerned about you, but i'm not trying to be weird, and anyway you used it first, so what does **that** mean? what are we doing?_ so he puts his phone on silent and hits the light switch on his way out of the office.

 

— 

 

They're in between the press conference and the showcase and Taemin's so wired on caffeine he's feeling the blood moving in his veins, which can't be a good sign, or particularly healthy for his heart. But—he's more concerned with his phone. He holds it up to his ear after dialing Jongin's number for the fifth time in a row now, and—voicemail. Again.

"What's wrong, hyung?" Hyunwoo asks, appearing from behind a rack of clothes backstage. Taemin startles, and musses Hyunwoo's hair to cover his surprise.

"Nothing. How's the knee, punk?"

"Good," Hyunwoo reassures him. "I feel fine."

Taemin winces a little. He's learned not to fully trust those words.

"Take it easy, yeah? It's going to be a long month. Pace yourself."

"Hyunwoo!" Baekhyun comes over, snapping his fingers. "What are you doing out here? Everyone else is in the green room warming up."

"Sorry, hyung."

"Don't be sorry, just go," Baekhyun says. "Now."

Hyunwoo scuttles off and Baekhyun flashes Taemin a megawatt grin, his perfect teeth white and gleaming. 

"That never gets old."

"What, bossing teenagers around?"

"It's the best power trip there is. Besides, nobody else listens to a word I say. It's nice to get some respect from _somebody_ around here." He looks over Taemin's shoulder, and then across the room and back again.

"Where's Jongin? Sitting in the audience for this?"

"Actually, I don't know," Taemin admits. "She's supposed to be here, but she's not answering her phone." Finally, an opportunity to tell the truth to Baekhyun. It's a relief, however small.

Baekhyun scowls. "Is she avoiding me again?"

"If she's avoiding you, she's avoiding me too," Taemin says. "Look." He hits redial and holds the phone out for Baekhyun to babysit because he's sick of listening to Jongin's stupid ringback tone, some obnoxious Chopin etude that has become so goddamn repetitive he's going to be listening to it in his sleep.

Baekhyun hands the phone back after a few moments. "Voicemail," he admits begrudgingly. "Is she okay? She's been so distant lately."

"She's always distant," Taemin points out. "She lives halfway across the world. Usually, anyway."

"You don't think she's being weird?" Baekhyun asks. "Ever since she got home, it's like she's doing her best to hide from everyone here. Sehun's been trying to get together with her and Jongin keeps blowing her off, and I never used to have trouble getting her on the phone. She'd always call back if she saw a missed call, but now…"

"I think she's being Jongin," Taemin says, which is true enough, hoping Baekhyun doesn't push it any harder because he doesn't know what else to tell him without giving Jongin's secret away. Still, he thinks, glancing back at the display of his phone to where the clock's flashing the time… she should be out of the doctor's appointment by now. He should have heard _something_.

"Things are okay with you two, right? No… uh, wedding regrets?"

"Just the one where we invited you," Taemin jokes. "Everything's good, Baekhyun. She probably forgot her phone in the cab. Not like she hasn't done that a million times before. I'll let her know she should call you as soon as I get hold of her."

As soon as Baekhyun leaves, Taemin tries a different tack. He's worried about Jongin. Even with a lost phone, she usually finds a way to get in touch with him to let him know not to call her phone anymore, so it's strange to him that he's heard… nothing at all, nothing since dawn. The last message of hers is still sitting in his inbox— _wouldn't miss it! ❤︎_ —except that for right now, she _is_ missing it.

He pushes the back door to the alley wide open and, with his newfound privacy, calls Jongin's mother, who _does_ answer the phone, on the fourth ring, just as Taemin's thumb moves to hang up. He catches it in time, the gentle: "Hello? Hello, who is it?" and scrambles to hold the phone back up to his ear.

"Hi, it's me. I can't get hold of Jongin," he says by way of apology. "I didn't hear anything after her appointment, and she's supposed to be here at the venue by now. Did she leave her phone in your car?"

"Oh, I assumed she called you. She's sleeping."

"Sleeping?" He looks at his watch. It's nearly 6 in the evening. "Is everything alright? How—uh, how did her appointment go? What did the doctor say?"

Jongin's mother pauses for a long beat. "They said no change. She—they want to fix it surgically."

"Oh, shit," Taemin says, before he has a chance to censor himself. He knows Jongin's mother is probably making the sign of the cross over his foul mouth, the way she'd done growing up every Sunday, listening to Taemin whisper rude things about the choir in Jongin's ear during Mass.

"Can I speak to her?"

"She was upset, she only fell asleep about half an hour ago. I think she wants to be left alone. Can I leave her?" she asks. "When are you finished?"

"Not until late," he says.

"She'll stay here tonight, then," she says. "Thank you, Taemin. We appreciate you looking after her."

"I—can you have her call me? When she wakes up? It doesn't matter what time it is. I'll be up."

"I will do that," she says, and hangs up before he can say goodbye.

He rubs his lower lip, rough skin of his untended cuticles scratching his mouth.

Jonghyun catches him making that face when Taemin comes back inside and immediately assumes the worst. "Oh god. Hyunwoo's knee?"

Taemin manages a smile. "No, hyung, everything's fine. Hyunwoo's knee is strong."

"Why are you making that face? You look so worried."

"Just nervous."

Jonghyun bursts out laughing. "You? You don't get nervous, Taemin. Not once since I met you. That's my job. What's gotten into you?"

Taemin briefly considers telling Jonghyun everything, the whole ugly story from start to finish, because Jonghyun has always been a source of comfort and someone Taemin confides in, but Violet Flashlight comes bounding into the auditorium just then, drawing Jonghyun's focus away from Taemin as he hurries to direct the girls into the green room.

Taemin walks away, out past the curtain and to the edge of the stage, looking out on the rows of empty seats. The first six rows are blocked off for the press and he can just about make out the news outlet names on each place card. It's going to be a full house in here in about twenty minutes.

Jongdae agreed to MC for the showcase, and he's sitting on a stool in the middle of the stage now, counting into the microphone while Minseok fiddles at the back, adjusting levels and frowning at the control panel mixing board. 

"Ah. Ah. Lee Taemin. Ah. 1, 2, 3. Check. Lee Taemin."

Taemin looks up and smiles at Jongdae, trying to force his attention back to the present, back to his job. "Hello, Jongdae-ssi. Are you the newest member of Y KNOT?"

"Ah, yes. I liked debuting so much I want to do it all over again," Jongdae confirms, still speaking into the microphone. "Where's Jongin? I want to show her my moves."

"Oh, she's—uh, she's not feeling well. She went home to rest. She's really sorry she couldn't make it," Taemin fibs. 

Jongdae frowns. "Oh no! Poor Jongin," he laments, his voice booming. There's a burst of feedback. Everyone winces.

"Sorry!" Minseok calls from the back of the auditorium. "Try it again."

"I'll tell her you missed her."

"Tell her she missed _me_! It's not every day I get to emcee these things," Jongdae says, holding the microphone a few inches further away from his face. "Hey, do you think you can teach me the choreography in the next half an hour?" Halfheartedly, he does a couple of the hand motions for Love War's chorus and laughs, mostly at himself.

"Not a chance. It'd take us six months. I've seen you and your two left feet in rehearsals, Jongdae," Taemin says, hopping off the stage and out of arm's reach, laughing brightly as Jongdae's whining protests echo in the large, empty room.

 

—

 

The showcase is a smashing success, just as Jongin predicted. They're getting a lot of positive buzz on the internet, and Y KNOT breaks into the top ten search terms on Naver and stays there for the better part of a few hours, so after the Y KNOT boys are sent back to their dorm under strict instructions not to break curfew, the staff gathers downstairs in Studio A with bottles of champagne and a huge cake covered in fresh fruit, decked out like a birthday cake with tall, thin candles.

Soojung creeps up behind Taemin sometime after Jonghyun blows out the candles. "I'm leaving," she says. "I don't want to make a scene because then they'll make me stay, but I'm tired and I want to go sleep in my own bed."

"You did great," Taemin tells her honestly. "They looked really good."

"That was all you. I'm mostly glad nobody set anything on fire or tore anything. They've got to wear those outfits the rest of the week," she says. "Every time we do this, I wonder how we're going to finish everything in time."

"We always do."

"Mmm." She tips her head. "Do you hear something?"

"Are you kidding?" he asks. It's deafening in here, with Baekhyun and Chanyeol squabbling over the piece of cake with the biggest strawberry on it while Jonghyun cues up a playlist of dance music to blast over the speakers.

"Yeah. Ringing?" She checks her phone and holds it up. "Not me. Is it you?"

He puts his hand inside his jacket and discovers it is his phone ringing, Jongin's picture flashing across the screen.

"How did you hear that?" he demands, incredulous, but also very anxious to speak to Jongin now that she's awake.

"I'm magical," Soojung says. "Okay, I'm leaving. Don't tell Jonghyun."

"I never saw you," he agrees, ducking out of the studio and across the hall into the single-occupancy bathroom for some privacy. "Jongin?"

"You never saw me?" she croaks, sounding exactly like she'd just woken up from her nap. 

"Soojung, not you. She's hiding from Jonghyun. It doesn't matter. Are you okay?"

"I'm really sorry I missed the showcase, Taemin, I know how important it was to you, I just—couldn't face everyone right now."

"It's okay. Your mom told me what the doctor said. That it isn't getting any better."

Jongin sighs. "Of course she did."

"Not the whole thing, though," he says, sliding down the wall until he's firmly seated on the cold tile floor. "What happened? I thought you were feeling better? Tell me everything he said."

"Aren't you supposed to be—I don't know, running a rehearsal or something right now? I'm interrupting you."

"Staff is across the hall getting drunk," Taemin says. Jongin laughs quietly.

"Jonghyun's going to start crying. He always does when you guys let him drink after a big event."

"Yes, but that's part of the fun. Don't take this away from us by appealing to our consciences, Jongin."

"I'm sorry," she says. Sighs again. She sounds so sad. "Are you—can you—I mean. Can you come home tonight?"

"Yeah, yeah, of course," he says quickly. "I'll come get you right now."

"Thanks." She exhales, her voice wavering. "I just—don't really want to stay here right now. I want to go home."

"Home? London, you mean."

"No, I mean. Well. With you," she fumbles, sounding awkward and unsure. "Can you—would it be easier if I called a cab?"

"No, don't. I'll be right there," he says. "Wait for my call."

 

She greets him in the lobby of her parents' building. "I left a note for them," she says when he asks. "They were already sleeping." She looks exhausted, much more so than she did when he left her yesterday morning, the last time he saw her. Back then, she was still pretending not to be in pain. She was still pretending that nothing was wrong. She's in sweatpants and an oversized t-shirt (items she definitely stole from his closet, he notices belatedly). The brace is back, ugly and prominent. He wisely chooses not to address the (black) elephant in the room.

They walk to the car in silence, her hand slipped around his for support. He helps her into the passenger seat of his car, leaning over her to buckle the seatbelt for her. She looks up at him, her expression strange but not unhappy.

"Thanks."

Usually she'd make a joke about being helpless, or elbow him in the ribs, or _something_ —instead, she sits back, passive, and accepts it, a weird, serene sort of smile playing on her lips.

"Hey," she says when he's about to put the car in drive. "Can you take me somewhere first?"

 

 _Somewhere_ turns out to be his studio. Not the one at SE, but the other one, the one he used to run with Moonkyu. The one where he pays the rent on but still fumbles with the keypad when he tries to disable the alarm before it summons the police. There's a painful moment where he thinks he's going to have to call Moonkyu for help, but then he remembers it, and the tense chirping from the alarm's wall unit falls silent. 

It's late. Long-past midnight now, so it's only the two of them here. She bypasses the front desk—slowly, limping again, finally giving into her body's weakness. Walking right into the eerie stillness of the main studio, she stops, staring at her reflection across the room. It's dark, except for the strip of emergency lights running along the ceiling. Just enough light to make out the shape of her.

Taemin stands at the threshold, watching her nervously. Her hand twitches and then curves, sudden elegance in her movements, her wrist cocked. Her good foot pushes out straight in front of her, knee bent just slightly into an _attitude devant_. Or, at least, an attempt at one.

"Dammit," she says quietly, still holding the position as best she can. "Fuck. Oh. _Fuck_." She's wobbling like crazy, all the weight on her bad ankle, threatening to give out at any moment. She shouldn't be doing this. He moves to stop her—

He comes up behind her, offering his hands. She takes them, still watching herself in the mirror as she shifts her balance back onto his palms, allowing him to support her. Her eyes close. Her eyelashes are wet.

"Tell me what happened," Taemin urges. "Tell me everything."

She takes a deep breath and moves to sit down. He helps her, still steadying her with his hands, guiding her into a seated position on the hard wooden floor. She doesn't let go of his hands, not even when he tries to extract himself to sit beside her, so he sits behind her instead, legs on either side of her, waiting for her to speak.

"My doctor is concerned about my range of motion." Finally, she opens her eyes. Catches Taemin's concerned gaze in the mirror and smiles at him, sadly. "I guess I've got a choice to make."

He waits for her to continue.

"He thinks it may be easier to go in and repair it surgically, since this hasn't been the magic fix it was supposed to be. I'm… there's no way I'll be able to dance again if I don't have the scar tissue removed. That's—a year, if I'm lucky. My entire season. Gone." 

"Were you lying to me these past few weeks when you said you weren't in pain?" Taemin asks. The minute he says it he winces, wishing he'd phrased it better. _Why were you hiding this from me,_ is what he means, _I would have tried to help you_ but he doesn't always have the words in time.

He feels her bristle against him, her spine stiffening against his chest, but she doesn't move away. "There's always some pain. You know how it is. Every joint in my body aches sometimes. Depends on the weather, or how I slept, or—a million other things."

"I know," he says, hand slipping onto her waist. He squeezes it comfortingly. "I know what you mean. I just—I've been so busy, I feel like I didn't notice what was happening. To you. Maybe you were trying to tell me, and I wasn't listening."

She laughs at that. "You idiot. It has nothing to do with you. I thought—it seemed okay. Or like it would eventually _be_ okay if I tried to push through it."

"Are you in a lot of pain? When you're moving around and pretending you're not injured? Tell me the truth."

"Yes," she says. "It's okay if I'm up and moving around—walking's slow,"—and he knows that, because he can see it in her altered gait, so cautious now—"but first thing standing up hurts. Stairs hurt. The first moment I put weight on it in the mornings—god, that hurts the most, honestly." She frowns. "I hate that I can't just stretch it out."

"What do you want to do?"

"I want… I don't know," she says. "I'm scared of having the surgery. What do I tell the company? What do I tell Benjamin? What if I never come back?"

"Forget those questions. What if waiting makes it worse?" Taemin asks frankly. "You hurt it a few years ago. Maybe this is… all stemming from that. Maybe you need a complete reset. A year off might be the best thing for you."

Her eyes flick down to her ankle, then back up to his face, watching their reflection in the mirror. "Taemin. You don't understand."

"You think I don't? I understand better than anyone else, because I know this industry. Come on. Not to mention, I know _you_." 

"I don't know what I'm supposed to do if I don't have this," she says, and breaks down sobbing, so forlorn and so sad that he pulls her fully into his lap and holds her like a child.

"One thing at a time," he says quietly, into the part of her hair. "You don't have to make a decision right now," he says. "Not tonight."

"I miss dancing so much already," she says, arms wrapped around his neck so tightly it feels like she may never let go. Taemin holds her back just as tightly, curving his hand around the back of her head, stroking her hair over and over, not saying anything because there's nothing to say, really, nothing that she doesn't already know. Nothing she hasn't already heard a million times.

Finally, she looks up from staring at the floor the floor, returning from inside herself, wherever she went. Her eyes latch onto Taemin's in the floor-to-ceiling mirrors. "Hi," she says, a little hoarse, sounding like she's wrestling with tears.

"Hey," he says, whisper-soft, trying not to break the spell. She leans back into his chest, her eyes fluttering shut.

"I like it here," she says, rubbing her cheek against the soft cotton of his shirt. "You seemed really happy here, too."

"Mmm. I was." He watches her, her eyes closed, peaceful, leaning back into his arms. "It's been a while since I've been able to come back here and work my own thing. I've got too much to do for Jonghyun."

Her hand starts moving slowly, soothingly, from his shoulder, down his bicep, and back again.

They're getting dangerously close to the line here. Dangerously close to not pretending anymore. Even now, there's no one here to watch their performance, but Jongin still laces their fingers together, and Taemin pulls her even closer, using the top of her head for a chin rest. For a moment it's like the world hesitates, to give them a little more time like this. Jongin's breathing stays steady and Taemin can't figure out _how_ , when his heart's suddenly hammering in his chest. His eyes drop to her outstretched leg across his lap, the black brace ugly and relentless and _wrong_. Everything about the reflection in front of him is strange.

When he glances back up he catches her watching him in the mirror. "Hi," she says softly. "What are you thinking about?"

"You tell me," he says. She laughs through her nose.

"You're thinking… you wish you had more time before Y KNOT debuts because you want to re-choreograph everything."

"Yes." He closes his eyes and lets his forehead come to rest against the side of her neck. She squeezes his hand and continues.

"You're thinking… that you're sad about my ankle, and you're sick of me hogging your bedroom."

"Yes. And no. Stay as long as you'd like."

She takes a deep breath. "What am _I_ thinking?" she asks, her voice barely above a whisper.

He hesitates. There's a stillness between them right now, like the calm before a thunderstorm where everything's vibrating and brilliant. He thinks. Breathes. Speaks. 

"You're thinking… you're in pain, but you don't want me to treat you like you're damaged."

"Yes."

"And you miss dancing so much that it's keeping you awake at night."

"Yes. And?"

"And?" He opens his eyes. They're blurry, somehow, but he can still see her reflection, watching him. "What 'and'?"

She kisses his cheek and grins at him, lopsided at first before it brightens her whole face. "And… I'm hungry."

The weird tension between them disappears and he laughs out loud. "Should I take you home, then?"

"Mmm. Yes please. But promise me you'll bring me back here when I can dance again," she says. "You can teach me things."

"I'd love to." He swallows hard. "But once you get better, won't you be gone?"

He notices she won't meet his eye in the mirror anymore when she gets to her feet.

 

—


	9. Chapter 9

The rumblings start around 10 o'clock the morning Y KNOT's album releases. Baekhyun's been hanging out in Taemin's office for the past hour because he's already been banished from Jonghyun's office (or from coming anywhere within 20 feet of Jonghyun) this morning, humming to himself and generally being fucking annoying, when suddenly his phone buzzes, and then buzzes again. He stops humming long enough to check it. Whatever it is, it's enough to draw a frown out of him. 

"What?" Taemin asks, wishing he wasn't rising to the bait, but he's curious. Baekhyun usually doesn't stop with his noises unless it's serious. "Album sales?"

"Nah, too early for that. Weird notification from Instagram," Baekhyun says, swiping his lock screen away. 

Taemin scoffs. "Why do you still have notifications turned on?"

Baekhyun's a glutton for attention, especially from Jongdae's fans, who seem to latch onto Baekhyun as a proxy, hoping for a closer glimpse into Jongdae's closely-guarded private life through his roommate. To Baekhyun's credit, he's very respectful of Jongdae's space, and even helps deflect for Jongdae when the _rumors_ about his sexuality start up every year or so, when it's been too long in between Jongdae's staged dates with one of his former co-stars, an actress from a different management company, or another singer—minor scandals, all carefully controlled. 

_See? It's fine. Everybody's lying,_ Taemin tells himself in an attempt to make himself feel better about what he's doing with Jongin. 

Baekhyun's still frowning at his phone, scrolling slowly. His hand stops. "Shit," he says. "Oh. _Shit._ "

"Jongdae?"

"No, look at this. Tell me that isn't who I think it is," Baekhyun says, shoving his phone into Taemin's hands. 

Taemin fumbles with it for a minute. It's a set of four pixellated screenshots of pictures posted on Twitter, posted as an Instagram update. The circular, thieving nature of social media. The account doesn't have an avatar, and it's not following anyone, but it seems to be popular enough with a follower count in the 5-digit range. Username **knet.eyesoftruth.1418** He's pretty familiar with the usual suspects, the tabloids that have been around forever, but this one appears to be a brand new outlet, or at least, new to him. The official SE account is tagged in the image, as well as all of the known Instagram accounts for everyone working at SE. So they wanted to be noticed.

He recognizes the mint hair right off the bat, even tied up in a ponytail and half-hidden under a baseball cap. Ivy. She's walking with—someone. A guy, he thinks, based on the other person's height and build. Dressed in black, her body hidden by an oversized jacket. They're holding hands. The pictures are from far away, far enough that they probably didn't even realize they were being followed. Taemin inhales sharply at the next one, because there's no mistaking the guy's hand on her buttocks. She's kissing him in the third picture, and again in the fourth, sitting up on a stone wall, her legs wrapped around his waist.

"Whoa," Taemin says. It's fairly bold behavior out in the open like that. Ivy should know better, considering she's not a rookie, and hasn't been for years. Somebody's always watching.

"Jonghyun's going to go nuclear," Baekhyun says. "I wonder if Minho knows?"

"If he doesn't yet, he will soon. He's tagged in this too," Taemin says, handing Baekhyun his phone. He swallows hard. This is less than ideal timing, but even if they weren't in the middle of debuting a brand new group, these pictures—they can't be explained away with the standard-issue denial, _they are friends and enjoying a close sunbae-hoobae relationship_. This is huge.

"Who's the guy?" Taemin wonders aloud while Baekhyun dials the phone. Baekhyun looks at him from under his eyebrows and shrugs.

"I'm sure we're going to find out very soon. Hey. Minho? Where are you? You're going to want to come in right now."

 

—

 

Another Instagram post goes up in the fifteen minutes it takes to track down Jonghyun and call him back into the office. With the album release and the debut appearances at the music shows this week, he would have looked crazed before this fell in his lap, but now he looks positively beside himself, his top lip and chin scruffy and unshaven, his hair a wild, unkempt mess. Taemin's pretty sure he's wearing yesterday's recycled outfit.

They hadn't told him the news yet, too afraid of the possibility of Jonghyun losing his shit in public, or driving his car off the road in a fit of pique. He's supposed to be home and sleeping right now, letting everyone else handle things at the company for a couple hours, but it's clear he's not going to get any rest today.

"What _now_?" Jonghyun demands, shutting the door behind them. "What is going on? My phone is ringing off the hook, and I haven't answered it yet because Baekhyun says we're in trouble. Did someone find out about Hyunwoo's knee? Because—"

Baekhyun holds up his phone, cutting off Jonghyun's rant with an impatient noise in the back of his throat. "Ivy was followed."

The color drains from Jonghyun's face. "Oh, god." He takes the phone gingerly, as if it could explode at any moment, and scrolls through the Instagram feed with his brows drawn together in a deep frown. His lips move slightly as he reads. "What is _this_? Speculating that it's Minho—are you _kidding me_? Come _on_! What is this hatchet job—who are these people?"

"No idea," Baekhyun says as Minho bursts through the door, looking nearly as haggard as Jonghyun. Looks like he hasn't gotten much sleep, either.

"Jonghyun—"

"It _wasn't_ you, was it?" Baekhyun asks, flipping the phone into Minho's hands. Puzzled, Minho catches it with an expert hand and squints at the series of pictures of him walking with Ivy at the airport from an overseas schedule last year, juxtaposed with an one of the new images. The uploader's drawn red marks to illustrate a similar height difference. Captioned: VF Manager Choi Minho?!!/?? Scandal!!!! #바이올렛플래시라이트 #아이비 #IVY #스캔들 #샤인_엔터테인먼트

Minho startles. "Jonghyun, I swear to god, I would _never_ , in a _million_ years—"

"Don't be stupid, I know it's not you. But you know who it is, don't you?"

Minho visibly hesitates. Jonghyun sits up a little straighter, his eyes bugging.

"Minho. Come on."

"I know," he says, looking ashamed of himself. "Except—I haven't even talked to her yet to see what's going on, and I promised her—I'm supposed to be on her side."

"And ours! We're all on the same side. I know being a manager only works if they can trust you, but Minho—if we don't get ahead of the story—look at this. 10,000 likes on the first one, 2,700 on the second one. This is just some junk gossip site, probably run by some creepy old guy with nothing better to do than to stalk idols, but pretty soon a legitimate outlet is going to pick up this news and run with it and then we're going to look like idiots because this completely blindsided us. Not to mention, this is going to screw with Y KNOT, because until we deal with this, every damn question we get is going to be about Ivy. Especially since her brother's in the group."

Minho slumps down on Jonghyun's couch, rubbing his face. "Yeah, yeah. You're right, I know, I just—"

"You have to give us all the information so we can protect her," Jonghyun says, his voice strained.

"It's Woobin."

The news is met with deafening silence. Taemin's shocked, and he can tell that the only person in the room who _isn't_ thrown off by Minho's confession is Minho himself. Woobin's quite a bit older than Ivy, from the first generation of SE idols, a member of KISS-INC. Taemin knows him, danced with him for years, has gotten drunk with him on countless occasions. Forget Ivy knowing better about carrying on a relationship in public—Woobin should have known better, and he should have protected her before this blew up.

"I'll kill him," Jonghyun says, voicing aloud what Taemin is thinking. "She's more than ten years younger than him, what is he _doing_? How long has this been going on?"

"The, uh. The Christmas concert," Minho says. "That stage they had together, I guess. He's been coming around a lot more recently."

"Nearly six months? Minho! Fuck. So there could be a lot of pictures out there that they've been waiting to release." Jonghyun sits back in his chair so hard the joints lurch and rattle, threatening to break underneath him. "I need to speak to them both right now."

"People who spend all of their waking hours together are fucking? A shocking revelation," Baekhyun says. "Honest to god, what a boring story. Almost as boring as Nation's Fairy Comes Home To Get Married," he says, grinning a little despite the somber mood in the building today. He winks at Taemin, who rolls his eyes. Jonghyun casts a ferocious glare in Baekhyun's direction.

"I've been calling her, and I can't reach her," Minho says. "I don't know where she is. I stopped by the dorm, and the girls say she left this morning. God, Jonghyun, I'm so sorry—"

"Is she with him?"

"Definitely not," Minho says. "I spoke to his manager on my way over, and they're in Osaka right now, so. Unless she hopped on a plane without any of us knowing, I think she's just hiding because she's afraid of being yelled at."

"Fuck, that's right, the Dome show." Jonghyun makes a gesture like he's about to bash his fist against the desk and then thinks better of it. "Okay. Keep trying," he says. "In the meantime, who do we know over at Dispatch?"

 

—

 

It gets away from them very, very quickly. Within the hour, sleuths with access to Woobin's Instagram account find a few suspicious pictures that seem to mirror pictures posted by Ivy on _her_ account around the same time. Then they find a picture of her at Y KNOT's showcase, wearing a sweatshirt identical to Woobin's favorite airport outfit. Next, they notice their matching rings—the one she wears on a necklace bears a striking resemblance to the one he wears on the index finger of his right hand.

It looks bad. It's not damning yet, but it's enough circumstantial evidence that fans of both groups go _crazy_. Jonghyun has to temporarily suspend the ability to comment on the company's Instagram, but that seems to make it worse. It overflows, onto Woobin's Instagram, and then Baekhyun's (which he sets to _private_ for the very first time since he started working for SE), before it migrates to the Youtube channel.

Before Jonghyun can speak to him about it and tell him to shut down his account until they can get the news under control and issue a formal statement, Woobin goes on the defensive immediately, calling the rumors baseless, telling fans to relax and trust him, that he'd tell them if he was dating anyone, that Ivy was nothing more than a colleague. 

Left alone, with no statement yet from her management or the company, she looks ridiculous, twisting in the wind like that. "She bought that ring herself, to pretend to be with him," says one comment with 485 upvotes. "Is she a sasaeng? In the same company?"

Meanwhile, Ivy's still MIA. Minho's been calling her cellphone every fifteen minutes. The voicemails he leaves grow increasingly desperate, begging her to please call him back, text him, let him know that she's alright. 

Jonghyun splits his time between checking the sales trackers for Y KNOT and calling every gossip columnist he's ever dealt with, promising them an exclusive if they can do him a favor and back off the Ivy story for 48 hours. Nobody seems willing to deal with Jonghyun, not when the pictures are already out there. Nor does anyone seem to know the identity of the person behind the _eyesoftruth_ account, only that they're trying to break into the gossip scene. This is a huge scoop. This is the kind of thing that gets attention and builds their reputation. The public now knows that their information is good and that they can be trusted.

Baekhyun comes in with lunch for everyone and hears the latest on Woobin's staunch denial of the rumors. "What's he doing speaking for himself? Why isn't his manager—"

"I don't _know_ ," Jonghyun huffs, digging through the paper bag for the carton of rice. His phone rings again, and he lifts it up briefly before slamming it back down into the cradle, an action he's been repeating all afternoon. "Believe me, that's a conversation we're going to be having the minute he lands back in Korea. But these are—incriminating, to say the least. Hard to deny. So there's nothing to be done but confirm it, except Woobin's statement complicates things."

"Make him do a cute concept for his next solo album," Baekhyun suggests cheerfully, ripping open the paper wrapper around his chopsticks with a wicked grin. "School uniforms look great on 35-year-olds. Knee socks, too."

Jonghyun snorts so hard it sounds like his food goes down the wrong way.

 

—

 

Eventually, they have to peel away for Y KNOT's rehearsal. Jonghyun announces he's going for a walk up to the roof, and Baekhyun volunteers to join him (probably to stop Jonghyun from screaming his lungs out, Taemin supposes). 

Minho follows Taemin up the north staircase to the third floor, where Studio B is located. Taemin can't help it now that they're alone—he has to ask. He turns to Minho.

"You knew what was happening before we called, didn't you?"

"I mean… of course I knew," Minho said. "But you know how they are. Ivy never takes no for an answer when she's got her mind set on doing something, and Woobin… I mean… I thought it was going to be a quick thing. Two weeks, maybe. You remember how he can be. He's never met a pretty girl he didn't like, and especially when they're young, and hang on everything he says…" He sighs. "I should have told Jonghyun what was going on between the two of them, but I didn't think anyone had figured it out yet, and with the Y KNOT debut so close, I thought it could wait and maybe they'd cool off before anything got out. I made a bad call," he says, cutting his thought short with a curt shake of his head, resolute now. "I'll figure it out. I just need to find her. I'm worried. She's never hidden from me before."

 

—

 

Jaehyun's waiting outside the studio when Taemin arrives. He looks guilty. "Hyung," he says quietly, his eyes flicking up nervously when Eric passes. "Is… did you… I mean, can I talk to you? It's kind of important."

Taemin takes one look at the troubled expression on Jaehyun's face and ushers him into a nearby practice room. "What's up?" he asks when the door is closed behind them.

Jaehyun fidgets, clearly wrestling with the words he's about to say. He opens his mouth, and then shuts it again. This happens a few times before he finally spits it out: "Is Ivy-noona in trouble? Is Jonghyun mad?"

It's the first time Taemin has ever heard Jaehyun express any sort of care or concern towards his sister. 

"He's worried about her. She hasn't been answering her phone."

"Are we in trouble?"

"Of course not," Taemin asks tiredly. "You haven't done anything wrong, it's nothing to do with Y KNOT at all."

"We're all on lockdown though," Jaehyun says. "Baekhyun-hyung took all of our phones."

"I think Jonghyun just wants to make sure that nothing else goes wrong today," Taemin says. "He wants you guys to have the best possible debut, no more distractions."

"Still. I just wanted to know that I wasn't in trouble."

"If this is an issue with Ivy, Why would _you_ be in trouble?" Taemin waits a beat, and it crystallizes. "You knew, too."

"She had me meet up with him a couple of times, give him letters and stuff—"

"I don't want to know," Taemin says. "That's her private business, and the less I know, the better. I'm obligated to tell all of that stuff to your manager so he can keep tabs on you, and if it's really serious, I'm supposed to let Jonghyun know, too." Taemin smiles grimly. "We can be friends, Jaehyun, and I want that for us someday—but you should protect yourself, too."

"I understand." Jaehyun nods a few times, eyes lowered to the floor. "She's afraid he's going to stop her from participating in the next comeback."

"Why would she think that? Jonghyun would _never_ —wait. You know where she is? You've spoken to her?"

Jaehyun shrugs. "She called earlier, before Baekhyun-hyung took my phone. I don't know."

Taemin grabs him by the shoulders and shakes him. "Jaehyun. Where is she?"

 

—

 

Studio M, all the way on the far side of the building on the top floor, is always the last resort for rehearsal space, owing to its out-of-the-way location and its shitty, fluorescent lighting. Jongdae uses it the most, because he can belt at the top of his lungs with no fear of the sound bleeding through to the hallways, but most days it lies dark and silent, too small to host any groups larger than three people, and without enough space for any particularly involved choreography. 

There's a loud commotion when Taemin flicks on the lights, the sound of someone tumbling out of a metal folding chair onto the floor. At the far side of the room, near the mirror, there's a figure in an oversized black hoodie, a green flash of hair—

"Ivy," Taemin says. "Have you been here all morning? Everyone's looking for you."

She looks up, her face still mostly hidden by the hood of her sweatshirt. Her eyes are rimmed red, her makeup smudged all the way down her cheeks. She's been crying. "Why would he say he didn't know me?"

Taemin sighs and sits down next to her, giving her enough space to breathe. "Ivy…"

"I know. We're not supposed to date. Jonghyun's said so a thousand times, and I _know_ , but…" She's got the sleeves of her sweatshirt pulled over her fingers, hands curled into fists. She takes a deep, shuddering breath. "I didn't see that person taking pictures. I swear."

"I know you didn't. They were taken from pretty far away."

"Jonghyun-oppa's going to dismiss my contract, isn't he? He's going to make me sit out the comeback, I bet."

"No, come on. Don't say that. Jonghyun's a reasonable guy, he wouldn't do that."

"Are you kidding? He's totally scary."

Taemin laughs out loud. _Scary_ seems like exactly the wrong word to describe someone who cries at the drop of a hat. "He's a pushover," Taemin says. "Don't repeat this to anyone, but he thinks of his idols like they're his kids. Especially Violet Flashlight. You girls were the first group he ever managed by himself. He hand-picked you for this. He'd never just dismiss you—he's worried about you, Ivy, you left the dorm without telling anyone where you were going—right as this story blew up on the internet—"

She starts crying again. "I ruined everything. Everyone probably hates me for all the trouble I've caused."

"No, you didn't ruin anything. Don't say that." Taemin pats her shoulder with a tentative hand.

"Woobin's so angry with me," she says, her face crumpling. "I can see that he read all of my text messages, but he hasn't replied to a single one."

"Woobin's an asshole," Taemin says frankly, and Ivy looks up with wide eyes. Taemin's usually pretty positive when he speaks about his experiences with KISS-INC, and he's never had a harsh word for any of the members before—at least, not in front of anyone that wasn't Jongin. But today has gotten under his skin in ways he hadn't anticipated, and he's furious.

"Oppa…"

"This isn't your fault, and he's made it ten times harder than it needed to be." Taemin smiles at her. "You want me to punch him?"

"No!" She laughs, but she's still crying so it comes out as a honking sound. "No, I—I like him. I really thought maybe… he understands me better than anyone. He understands my life, he's not mad when I'm in rehearsals all day because he's in them too…"

"He's not the only one. He won't be the last," Taemin says encouragingly. "Look, it's been years since I spent any real time with him, but. I think you could do better. Plus, you're a much better dancer than he ever was."

"That's the nicest thing you've ever said to me," she says, wiping at her eyes with the cuff of the sweatshirt sleeve. He scoffs and pushes her shoulder gently. 

"I say lots of nice things."

"What's it like?" she asks after a moment of silence between them. He raises an eyebrow.

"What's—what like?"

"Being in love. Getting married." She scrubs at her face again. "It seems so nice."

He hesitates, unsure of what to tell her. _It's all for show,_ he wants to say. _It looks nice because it's not real._

"I remember her. Jongin-unnie. When I was a trainee. She used to sit in rehearsals sometimes when she came to see you. I remember thinking she was the prettiest person I'd ever seen in my life." She smiles. "You guys have loved each other for a long time, huh?"

Taemin thinks back to that time, back when he and Jonghyun were running the company on a shoestring budget, trying to convince the board that their new girl group could be as popular and profitable as KISS-INC. 

"Yeah," he says, his voice roughened and strange, even to his own ears. 

"How am I supposed to know if Woobin is worth it? How did you know that she was the one?" 

"I never really thought about it," Taemin says, which is close enough to the truth. "I've known her forever. She's always been an important part of my life, ever since we were kids."

"That's so romantic." Ivy sighs wistfully. "I'm never going to get married. Nobody's going to love me now." She looks like she's gearing up to cry again.

"You're only 22," Taemin says delicately. "You have a lot of hearts left to break before you settle down."

"It just seemed… perfect, and he might be my only chance—"

"Ivy. The way you're talking, you sound like you're ready for retirement. I'm officially tapped out of advice to give you," Taemin says frankly. "But you can't let this stuff distract you."

"Can I tell you something? I don't know if I want Violet Flashlight to be my whole life forever," she whispers. "I'm tired of three comebacks a year and shows every weekend and holidays away from my family."

Taemin feels a weird twist in the pit of his stomach. He can't imagine being that fed up with this life. He's never wanted something as badly as he wanted his career. Although—he's starting to understand, perhaps, that there has to be something else, something to come home to at the end of the day.

"This is something you should talk through with Minho," he says. "I can't tell you what to do. It's your decision. I'm just the choreographer. Doesn't matter what I tell you outside of the practice room."

"You're more than that, oppa. You do a lot around here."

Between them, Ivy's phone starts ringing again. He sees the picture of Minho flash across the screen.

"Get it," he says. "He's worried sick about you."

"I just—I hate disappointing him." She holds it with both hands for a moment longer. "What have I done?" she says, quietly. "What do I do now?"

He taps the edge of the vibrating phone with his fingertips. "Answer it. Let him know you're okay. He'll know what you should do next."

 

—

 

First day sales for Y KNOT are good. In all the chaos happening around the company today Taemin almost forgets to check, but preliminary numbers have them on track to break 80,000 for the day, maybe even 250,000 for the week, which would be an outstanding achievement for a debut release and completely respectable for a rookie group. So Taemin's happy—at the very least, one thing has gone right for SE and Jonghyun today.

Taemin swings by Jonghyun's office on his way out of the building to see if he's heard the news, or if he's too knee-deep in Ivy and Woobin's scandal. The official statement went out around 6PM, but it was too late to catch the evening news cycle, and so it's going to be at least one full night of absolute fucking nonsense before things start to level off. It's after dark, and Taemin almost expects Jonghyun to be gone, but the light's still on, so he knocks and waits to be summoned inside.

"Taemin," Jonghyun says. "Come in. Hey, did you see Y KNOT's numbers? Baekhyun came by earlier."

"I did. Congratulations, hyung, you did it. Again."

"Couldn't do it without you. That goes for everything that happens around here. I heard you talked with Ivy today, and I appreciate you getting her to check in with us."

Taemin sits heavily on Jonghyun's couch. "How is she? How—what's going to happen?"

"Well, she's terrified of me. She cried the entire time she was in here." Jonghyun shakes his head. "It was awful. I don't like making them cry. And I can't get mad at someone who cries that hard—especially after the beating she's taken on social media today. I'm not cruel." He glances up at Taemin, eyes dull and tired. "I'm taking a vacation after this, I swear to god."

Taemin chuckles. "No you're not, hyung. You haven't taken a vacation in the entire time I've known you."

"Oh, who am I talking to? You're exactly the same way."

"Well, then, maybe it's time…" Taemin says, and trails off awkwardly. Jonghyun's neck snaps up, his eyes wide and fearful.

"Oh, Taemin, please don't tell me you're choosing this exact moment to quit on me, I can't take it."

"Hyung—"

"I mean, today's already been a fucking disaster. This is going to distract from Y KNOT, I just know it. The board's going to look at what I'm doing with the company and think I don't know what the fuck I'm doing, which is pretty accurate, because I do not have a fucking clue."

"Jonghyun—"

Jonghyun barrels on, sounding positively manic. "I mean, god only knows why they picked me to be CEO Shin's successor, I'm running this place into the ground, I cannot keep people on staff— _you're_ halfway out the door and I have no idea how to get you to stay, especially when your wife's career keeps her halfway across the world."

"Stop. Jonghyun, I promise—I'm not going to leave the company. No matter what," Taemin says. "I've been trying to figure out how to tell you this—and I hate to do this right now, I know you're dealing with a lot, with Y KNOT and Ivy and everything…"

"Taemin," Jonghyun warns. 

"No, no—hyung, no. Nothing—nothing's wrong, I promise. I just—Jongin's got a gala next weekend. In London. For the end of the season. And they—she has to show up, for the investors, and—"

"And you're going."

Taemin nods. "She needs me there."

"Taemin." Jonghyun sighs. "Has anyone ever told you that you have the worst timing?"

"I know, hyung. I'm so sorry. It just came up—her manager's insisting, and—"

"Does Jongin know that you're promising to stay with SE? Does she know about the Violet Flashlight tour? Or does she think you're going to move to London eventually."

"We haven't exactly talked about it," Taemin says. "It's all—happening pretty fast, and there's a lot going on."

Jonghyun leans back in his chair, pursing his lips with frustration. "You got married without talking about this kind of thing first? Taemin—I don't understand. You _know_ that marriage isn't some decision to be taken lightly, and I know that this was a long time coming between the two of you, but—what are you telling me right now? Your careers and where you're going to live seems like a big thing to skip over when you're discussing a future together."

Taemin sighs. He's so close to telling Jonghyun, just to get him off his back. Just so he'll understand _it's not like that_. Jongin's tearful face from the other night stops him. It's not his secret to tell, not yet.

"Look. I'm not trying to lecture you, Taemin, you're an adult. I'm just worried about you. Not because you're my best employee—and shut up, don't tell Baekhyun or Chanyeol I said that—but because you're my friend, maybe even the closest one I have here in the company. I'd hate to see this end badly between you and Jongin. You're both good people and you deserve the happiness you've found with each other."

Taemin's taken aback by Jonghyun's earnest admission. Jonghyun's been thinking about them—together, as a couple—fondly, for some time now. Jonghyun's not shocked by their relationship, not shocked by the marriage, not shocked by _anything_ —except Taemin's lack of preparedness, the fact that they dived headfirst into this thing without ironing out the details.

If only Jonghyun knew it doesn't matter in the slightest, not when there's an expiration date on the whole thing.

 

—

 

He's still thinking about the events of the day later, when he's finally back at home with Jongin, where he'd wanted to be since the minute he woke up. He's sitting on the opposite end of the couch from her, dutifully holding the ice pack to her ankle even though his fingertips are blue and numb and have been for the past twenty minutes. She keeps drifting off to sleep and then waking up long enough to smile at him, only to fall asleep again.

There's been a marked shift in Jongin's behavior since her appointment the other day. She's softer, somehow, holding his hand a little more often, her voice gentle when she whispers in his ear after the lights go out at night. Being so close to her like this, he keeps having to remind himself that this isn't real, none of it is. She's just so lost and she's looking to Taemin, her best friend, to keep her from being completely adrift. 

They haven't really talked about her ankle at all. Or, they have, but in a vague, roundabout way, obliquely referencing it. Jongin always changes the subject, and Taemin knows that is her right, to keep it to herself until she figures it out. The fact that she's even letting him help by holding the ice pack is a huge concession on her part.

Taemin wakes her when the ice pack's mostly melted. She rubs her fists against her eyes and yawns.

"I fell asleep on you again," she says a little woefully. "I'm so sorry. You should wake me up when I do that. It's not fair, I haven't gotten to see you all day. I don't want to sleep through this now."

He carefully extracts himself from underneath her feet so he can go to the kitchen and refill the ice pack. "It's okay, you're tired and your body needs the rest so you can heal. I was keeping myself company."

"Mmm." She stretches and rolls onto her side. "You never finished telling me about what happened with Ivy. Is she alright?"

"We'll see," Taemin says, flexing his fingers, trying to coax his circulation back to life. "I think she'll be okay, but we just have to wait and see if and when it all blows over."

"So stupid." Jongin yawns. "Poor Ivy. Being treated like a criminal when all she did was fall in love."

"She spent most of the day hiding from Minho. It's funny for me to think about, because in my experience, managers are supposed to have your back. They're supposed to be the one person in the company you trust over everyone else."

"It's hard, sometimes. Trying to find a balance between a personal and professional relationship with someone you spend most of your days _and_ nights with," Jongin says, lying back down on the couch, watching Taemin shuffle around the kitchen. She's lying on her arm. "I mean, I pay Benjamin, but it's not necessarily in his best interests to let me do _anything_ I want. He wants me to keep in London's good graces, because that's where the money is. I can understand… Ivy not being sure if she can trust Minho. She's not signing his paychecks. Jonghyun is."

"I never really thought of it that way." Taemin comes back in and sits on the floor next to her, looking up at her lovely face. "A manager is supposed to function as your safety net."

Jongin closes her eyes. "Is this—are you using a conversation about Ivy to talk about me, instead?"

"Yeah, I am," Taemin says, putting his hand over hers. "Look, I've been thinking about it all day, and you need to tell him as soon as possible. He's in the best position to help you do what's right for your career. He can help you figure out what your next step is. Besides, you like him, right? You guys are friends?"

"Not like you and me," she says slowly.

"Don't be ridiculous. Nobody's like you and me," he teases, watching the resulting smile dimple her cheeks. "But you can trust him. You never would have hired him if you didn't feel that way. I know how you are, I know what's important to you."

"Yes," she says after a pause that stretches for far too long. "Yes, you're right. He's never let me down."

He takes her hand now, brings it to his chest and holds it there. "Please promise me. We won't come back from London without Benjamin knowing about your ankle. The—the marriage thing is fine, I don't care, Jongin. I will be your husband as long as you need me to be. But we have to figure out the next step in your recovery. That's the most important thing right now."

She smiles, a pink flush in her cheeks, but she doesn't say anything, just strokes the hair at the nape of his neck with the first three fingers on her right hand.

"What?" he prods. "Why are you making that face?"

"You said we," she says, grinning shyly.

"Yes?"

"It's my ankle, not yours, Taemin. I'm the one who's hurt."

"As long as you're hurt, so am I," Taemin says. Jongin's smile softens into that unrecognizable expression she's been making so often lately, hazy and beautiful and half-asleep when she tips her face up and kisses him on the cheek, her lips so close to the corner of his mouth that when she pulls away, this time, he's the one blushing.

 

—


	10. Chapter 10

Very, very late Wednesday night, Taemin rides back from Show Champion to SE's building in the passenger seat of a company van, surrounded by a bunch of sweaty teenage boys who keep shoving each other and laughing too loud for the late hour. 

"You're really leaving us, hyung?" Hyungwoo asks, twisting around from where he's been sitting side-saddle in his seat to peer up at Taemin. 

"Just for the weekend. I'll be back in time for rehearsal Monday morning."

"Bring me back a souvenir," Minjae says. "What do they have in London?"

"Burberry," Eric cuts in quickly. "And the Crown Jewels. Hey—does Jongin-noona know the Queen?"

Taemin laughs. "I don't have time to go shopping for you punks. Behave yourself while I'm gone. And don't think I won't be watching performances just because I'm not there. Donggeun's going to be taping everything. I'll have a whole plane ride home to take notes."

 

—

 

Predictably, neither Jongin nor Taemin bother to pack until the next morning. Jongin doesn't even bother with a suitcase of her own. With an hour left before the cab's due to arrive to take them to the airport, she tosses a few toiletry items in Taemin's suitcase, retrieves Taemin's phone from where he'd accidentally stuffed it in his dress loafers, and hands it back to him.

"That's all you're bringing?" he asks, raising an eyebrow. "Are you planning on going in jeans to the gala, or—"

"Don't be stupid," she says, zipping his bag shut with a decisive yank. "I live in London, remember? I have a whole closet full of clothes in my flat. Did you think I came home with everything I own?"

"Right," he says, immediately feeling foolish. He _had_ forgotten. Or, rather, he's been trying so hard not to think about it that a detail this obvious didn't occur to him. He covers his mistake with a smile. "Got anything back in London that I can borrow?"

She punches his shoulder and disappears back into his bedroom to look for her passport. 

 

—

 

They're late arriving to the airport. Taemin's quite happy to blame Jongin for losing her passport (she'd left it at her parents' house) but when Jongin's mother dashes across town to bring it, she's also mysteriously got Taemin's checkbook, as well. 

Even though it's early afternoon, Jongin tips her head onto Taemin's shoulder while they're in line for security, knuckling sleep out of her eyes. She's got a black mask pulled over her mouth and a baseball cap tugged down strategically to hide her face. They'd hoped to avoid her fans, but there are still a handful here—not many, but enough that Taemin can hear them call to her over the nasal, droning flight announcements over the airport loudspeaker. They must have seen her name added to the guest list for the gala in London. And because the fans are drawing attention to Jongin—and, by proximity, to Taemin—some people in line recognize her from her pictures in the paper and she has to cover her face with her hand when their camera phones come out.

"Please, no pictures, I'm not wearing makeup," she says, .

"Like it makes a difference," Taemin says, angling himself to block her from their line of sight anyway. "You look pretty even without it."

She glances up at him but the brim of the hat hides everything above her huge grin. He pokes at her chin and steps forward, reluctantly moving away from her to pass through the metal detector. His shoulder is noticeably colder without her head upon it.

—

After they board the plane, he puts Jongin's bags in the overhead bin and waits for her to get settled into her seat before he sits next to her. She reaches out for his hand immediately and it's like magnets coming together, second nature, to slip his fingers between hers and squeeze. He hasn't even fastened his seatbelt yet. 

After a few moments, she kisses him on the cheek and extracts her hand to fasten her own seatbelt. His mouth is dry and his pulse is rabbit-quick and racing. He swallows hard. This is… becoming more difficult than he anticipated, thinking about pretending and realizing the line is so blurred that he doesn't know where it is anymore, or what he wants to happen once this is over. Her entire trip home—this entire charade has been a butterfly-inducing, stomach-aching, upside-down mess. 

The most terrifying realization: gun to his head, he doesn't want it to be over at all, not ever, not know that he knows what he's missing when she's not with him. 

A rattling noise jerks him back to the present. 

"Hm?" he says, faintly aware that Jongin's asking him a question, although the words aren't registering.

"I said, I usually take a pill for these long flights," she says, holding a small bottle out to him. "Do you want one?"

"You're not going to stay awake and talk to me?"

"Taemin."

"You're terrible company. I'm not traveling with you again. We should honeymoon separately."

"Shut up," she murmurs, grinning into the collar of her shirt. She tucks the pill bottle away, back in the front pocket of her bag. "Fine. Entertain me. If you're insisting on keeping me awake for 14 hours, then what are we going to talk about?"

"Should we plan our separation?" Taemin half-jokes, testing the waters between them. Beyond his own panic, he doesn't know what she's thinking about all of this—he always used to be able to read Jongin's mind, better than his own most days. It was easy to know her feelings when she wore them on her sleeve. But it's hard to look, when there's a possibility he might be taking this too seriously, when she might be detached from it, counting down the days until she's rid of him for good. She's not stupid enough to fall in love under these circumstances.

Her smile dims, and her laugh sounds a little hollow. "I'm sorry this is taking so long. I'm sure you're sick of pretending."

He kisses her temple to reassure her—or maybe himself. "Stop. I already told you—"

"I know, but this wasn't what you signed up for."

"I signed up for you."

She turns her head to nod at the flight attendant brushing past, reminding them to fasten their seatbelts, but he swears he sees a slight flush rise to her cheeks. When she turns back to him it's gone and he second-guesses himself. He must have imagined it. He's hoping too hard.

"Listen," he says instead. "This is supposed to be a weekend for you. We're just two newlyweds attending a gala. You're my wildly successful, talented wife, and I'm—"

"My superstar choreographer husband." She looks at him and the way her smile spreads across her face almost looks tender. "We make quite the power couple."

"Fake power couple," he corrects her gently.

"Yeah. About that." She seems to wrestle with something inside herself for a moment before she comes to a decision. "We're not going to have a lot of downtime while we're in London," she says, and darts forward to kiss the corner of his mouth, a gesture that's equal parts shy _and_ bold. She stays close after, hovering, her eyes dark and peering up, not quite meeting his. "It has to—I mean, we—it has to be real—just for the weekend." 

He considers this for a beat, watching the wrinkle at the bridge of her nose deepen when he doesn't respond right away, his heart clenching, his tongue frozen against the back of his teeth. 

"You sure?" he says quietly, finally, although if he's being honest, he's not quite sure if he's posing the question to her, or to himself.

"If it's getting to be too much—"

He cuts her off with his mouth on hers, kissing her properly for the first time since their wedding day. She leans into it, brooking no resistance from him when she curls her hands into his sweater to draw him closer. When they break apart she's slightly out of breath and trying to pretend she's not, but the tiny grin on her lips gives her away. He tugs the ends of her hair, teasing her. 

Over Jongin's shoulder, he catches the flight attendant watching them from the next row. She swivels around when he catches her eye, pretending she hadn't noticed the young married couple already cozying up to each other in first class before takeoff. She might even recognize them, after all the press garnered by Jongin's marriage announcement. And it's good, he tells himself, it's thrilling, this secret they're keeping. It's good that people believe they're married, because if they're watching Jongin's smile, they're not going to notice her limp.

His attention returns to Jongin, still half in his arms, the strings of his sweatshirt still wound around her fingers. Her eyes are wide, pupils dilated, full of wonder and something he can't quite place because he can't remember if he's ever seen her look at him that way. Impossible. He'd never have forgotten it if she had.

"What?" he asks, suddenly hesitant. Was it too much? Did he cross the line—

"Just shocked, is all," she says, shrinking back into her seat. "I was starting think you were a bad kisser."

He laughs, a short, sharp noise that sounds more like a bark. "And now?"

"Acceptable. You've got potential." She squeezes his hand. Even if there's a little voice inside his head warning him not to get too attached to moments like these, he feels light, looking forward to the weekend stretched out ahead of them. When their sham of a marriage is over, they'll at least be able to say they had this.

 

—

 

It's just after 5PM when they land at Heathrow, except it's sometime in the middle of the night for Taemin. His head's stuffy from lack of sleep and his throat burns after breathing the stale, recycled cabin air for half a day. He purposely avoids looking at his reflection in any glass surface they pass because he _knows_ he looks busted. Jongin, looking much more well-rested than Taemin thanks to the five hour nap she'd taken somewhere over Europe, slips her hand in his unprompted while they're waiting in line at Customs. Taemin looks at her and blinks a few times, his brain sluggish and unresponsive. 

"Mmm?"

"Wake up," she says, pecking him on the mouth the way she'd been doing off and on throughout the whole flight. "It isn't time for bed yet." 

Taemin's never been particularly great at traveling—specifically, the first 24 hours in a new time zone are always a struggle. Previous visits to see Jongin perform in London were always bookended by enough time for his internal clock to adjust. Exhaustion usually brings out the worst in his attitude, but he doesn't want to snap at Jongin even if she'd forgive him for it, so he wrinkles his nose and sticks his lower lip out in an exaggerated pout.

"I'll give you five billion won to let me go home and sleep."

She rubs his back with her other hand. "Benjamin's expecting us to have dinner with him. But after that, I promise."

"Speaking of Benjamin. Are you going to tell him tonight?" he asks once their passports have been stamped and they're waiting at the luggage carousel for their suitcase. 

"No," she says quickly. "I was going to do it after the gala."

"Isn't that cutting it a little close? We're not here for that long."

"One thing at a time," she says. "I don't want a black cloud hanging over me when I'm supposed to be nice to the patrons. I'll ask to speak to him on Sunday, before we leave."

Taemin opens his mouth to say something in response to that, but with only half of his synapses firing, it takes him a beat too long.

"Jongin! Jongin, love! Over here!"

Jongin turns sharply. Taemin stumbles as she moves away from him to greet Benjamin.

He's met Jongin's manager in person at least half a dozen times, usually backstage after one of Jongin's performances, but it never fails to shock him just how tall and reedy the guy is. He's dressed in a waistcoat and jeans today, looking cool and professional but somehow barely old enough to drink, even though Taemin knows he's solidly in his thirties. At first glance you'd mistake him for some sort of unemployed coffee shop hipster, not exactly the person you'd expect to be managing one of the world's greatest ballet talents.

Taemin shakes his hand and dutifully follows behind to the car park, where they climb into Benjamin's Audi. Taemin takes the backseat—mostly so he can stretch out and pretend he's not dozing, but also so Jongin can have the leg room up front to stretch her ankle. She hasn't complained but he can see she's moving slowly after spending the day confined to an airplane.

Benjamin and Jongin chatter to each other in English, and Taemin's tired brain can't keep up. He takes the opportunity to turn his phone back on to check his messages. A thousand emails come sliding into his inbox the minute his network connects, including one from Jonghyun to the entire staff with more information about the stage specifications for Violet Flashlight's upcoming release, and a follow-up, just to Taemin, reminding him about the fall tour.

He must spend a moment too long staring at his phone in silence because the conversation up front ceases, and when he looks up Jongin's turned around in her seat, staring back at him.

"Is everything okay?"

"Yeah, it's just Jonghyun." He doesn't want to tell her about the tour like this, with Benjamin sitting between them. "Checking in."

"Tell him I say hi," she says. 

"I'll tell him you downloaded Y KNOT's song illegally and you hate it."

"Do it. He knows you're the one that says terrible things, not me," she says serenely. "I'm much nicer to him than you are."

He laughs brightly, and Benjamin joins in, even though it's clear he doesn't have a clue what they're talking about. Jongin switches back to English and explains, and Benjamin laughs harder.

 

—

 

Benjamin takes them for barbecue at a Korean restaurant in central London. "Like home, I hope," he says, sloshing soju all over the table when he tries to pour. Taemin smiles politely even though he's half-asleep because he's been awake for what feels like two days at this point and he just wants to go to bed. The food's good, he thinks dimly, but he barely tastes it, and Jongin keeps having to elbow him to respond to Benjamin's rapidfire questions about his career.

"God, I'm so sorry about that," Jongin apologizes to him later, when they're back in her flat and Benjamin's gone. "I told him nothing special, we'd just pick up something on the way home from the airport—you look exhausted. He was excited you were coming and he's trying really hard to impress you—“

"It's okay," Taemin says, feeling the irresistible pull of sleep, his stomach full, his head foggy with liquor. "I like Benjamin. I'm sorry, I'm just jetlagged."

"I know," she says, sitting on the edge of her bed to rub at her ankle. "Me too."

He showers to get the stink of food and airplane travel off his skin and waits on the couch with a towel over his face in a half-hearted attempt to dry his hair, listening to the water run in the other room as Jongin takes her turn. He dozes off like that, and wakes up to Jongin shaking him, frowning, her hair wet and twisted in a braid down her shoulder. The lights in her tiny flat are dim now, the golden glow of a ceramic lamp on the bedside table framing the tall shadow of Jongin's body on two walls at once.

"Don't sleep here," she says. She's got her glasses on again. It gives her a soft, owlish look. "Get into bed."

He scoffs. "Your bed? Jongin." It's small, a full-size, not enough space for Taemin and Jongin AND Jongin's elbows, but he's too tired to insist on taking the couch, so they make do. His head is heavy and spinning from the jetlag and the alcohol. When she turns off the lights he lies there a moment and then giggles.

"Is the room spinning for you, too?" Jongin asks. He laughs.

"Yeah."

"What a mistake," she says, her hand finding his in the dark. "Oh, Benjamin, why?"

"Mmm."

"What did Jonghyun want?"

"Hmm?"

"Earlier. The email. Is everything okay at SE? How's Ivy doing?"

He frowns. The effort of remembering entire sentences is taxing when he's this tired and this drunk. "She's good," he says finally, unsticking his tongue. He's slurring a little but after years of seeing Taemin in every state of sobriety on the spectrum, Jongin seems to understand him perfectly. "Jonghyun wants me to direct the Violet Flashlight tour this fall."

"That's amazing!"

"It is. It'll be a lot of work."

"You've never been afraid of that."

"I'm not afraid of it," he says, "it's just—what if you need me around and I'm not there?"

She pauses for so long that he thinks maybe she fell asleep. "Taemin. Don't—please don't turn down opportunities because of—me, this."

He's a little more awake now, even though he desperately doesn't want to be. She sounds so unhappy that he rolls over to face her in the dark, nearly elbowing her in the face.

"Jongin, it's not just—I mean, it—there's a lot to consider."

"It's what you want to do. What's there to consider? Take me out of it. I'm serious, take me out of your decision. What would you do?"

"I'd take it, but—"

"See!"

He laughs at how insistent she is. "Baekhyun would kill me if I started working 18-hour days while you're still at home in Seoul, and if you're getting the surgery, then you—"

"—Taemin, you can't say no when you're being offered a chance like this—"

"Jongin, it's okay," he soothes, nudging her with his shoulder. "I'm not throwing my career away. I just don't know exactly what I'm going to tell Jonghyun yet, that's all."

"You're going to tell him yes. Tell him your wife says you're doing it."

 _Your wife._ He smiles before he can stop himself, can't help it. "What about you?"

"If I'm getting the surgery, you're doing the tour. That's the deal." She twists her body, trying to get comfortable in the limited space they're sharing. She ends up with her head sort of nestled in the space between his arm and the pillow.

"Okay," he says, his whisper muffled a little by her hair.

"Even if I end up back here for the surgery, you can't say no to Jonghyun." 

That one stings a little. He doesn't want her to be alone—and, if he's being honest with himself, he's grown too used to this to be alone anymore, too. "You should go to the best," he says dutifully. "I can visit on weekends."

"No, you can't. When do you get weekends? Not when you're busy on a tour, that's crazy." 

"We'll work it out," he says.

"We will." She yawns. "Go to sleep. You have to be charming tomorrow."

"I'm always charming—" he says, and then splutters when she mashes her hand into his face to shut him up, cursing him while laughing so sweetly it makes him ache.

 

—

 

Sometime before dawn, Taemin comes out of a weird, fuzzy dream and into what feels like another one. They'd somehow ended up spooning last night and he's lying on his side, holding Jongin close, their fingers laced. It's still pitch black in Jongin's apartment, even with the curtains half-drawn, so it's still the middle of the night here, even if his internal clock doesn't agree. He shifts and all at once comes to the uncomfortable realization that he's a little hard. He sucks in a breath and holds it, trying to will it away. How long have they been sleeping like this, his body pressed tightly against Jongin's, with absolutely no breathing room between them—? 

Jongin stirs. He freezes. _Fuck._

"Why are you awake right now," she whispers, groggy.

"Jet lag," he says, and impulsively kisses her shoulder. "Sorry. Go back to sleep." He takes the opportunity to roll away from her as much as he's able to do in the cramped space, hoping she hasn't gained enough consciousness to notice. Some room will help. He takes a few deep breaths. The absence of her body heat, no longer smelling her skin—the tension passes.

Except— 

She makes a disgruntled, sleepy noise and rolls over to chase him, her eyes still scrunched shut. "Don't go, you're warm," she says on an exhale, nearly yawning. "Mmm. Better. Sleep more."

At her command, he manages to doze off again with her head on his chest, and when he opens his eyes again it's hours later. The light through the windows has shifted, and Jongin's wide awake, propped up on one elbow and staring down at him, just watching him sleep. She smiles shyly when she catches him staring back.

"Hey."

"Hi?" he says, voice thick in his throat. "What time is it?"

"A little after eight."

He groans and covers his eyes with his forearm. "Still too early."

"Mmm. I can't sleep anymore." Her hand traces up from his chest to the side of his neck. He shivers, his skin hypersensitive, his body rising back to attention at her touch. It's getting difficult to remember that none of this is permanent. He's far too used to the shape of her in his arms. 

"So you want company, then?" he says softly, reaching up to run his hand through her hair. It's hardly the tender gesture he intends it to be. His knuckles get snagged in a large knot. She winces and cries out.

"Ow! Not anymore! Jesus," she says, laughing a little as Taemin gets his hand free. She works at the knot with her fingers, sitting cross-legged and just out of his reach now. 

"I'm so sorry. Brush your hair once in a while," he shoots back although he is genuinely sorry and sits up to cup her knee. "Are you okay?"

"Do I have any hair left for tonight?" she asks. "I'm going to have to wear a hat."

He pushes a pillow into her face and gets up to brush his teeth.

 

—

 

Taemin tries to nap the rest of the day in anticipation of a very late night, but he's still exhausted an hour into the gala. He smiles his way through introductions to her entire company and their spouses and then retreats to a table at the edge of the room to let Jongin make the rounds.

She looks stunning in the dress Benjamin brought by for her earlier in the day—deep, midnight blue silk, wrapped around her like a second skin. The skirt's long enough that she _could_ have feasibly concealed her brace, but she's without it tonight. The adrenaline's keeping her upright (as well as a healthy dose of painkillers in the car before they arrived). Her ring twinkles off her third finger, catching the light when she lifts her champagne glass to her lips.

She turns and catches him staring at her across the room. Her eyes scrunch shut into a delighted smile and she goes to him.

"You look incredible," he says, beaming up at her. "I can't believe I married this well."

"I know you did. You've got good taste. Are you having fun?" she asks, sitting in the empty chair beside him. "You're all alone over here."

"I'm sorry I'm being antisocial. I'm sleeping with my eyes open," he confesses, pinching at the bridge of his nose a little in an attempt to wake himself up. "How's your ankle?"

"Sore, but I'm managing." She leans over. "I'm sorry I dragged you across the world for one night."

"You didn't drag me. Did you know," he says, murmuring quietly in her ear, hand cupped to muffle the sound around them. 

She waits. "Yes?"

"That you are, by far, the most beautiful woman here?"

She bursts out laughing. "Taemin! Shut up. That's so cheesy!"

With Jongin in such close proximity to his face, he seizes the opportunity to kiss her cheek. She flushes a delicate pink and touches her face where his mouth had just been.

"Should we come up with a secret code? In case your ankle gets worse?" he asks, still teasing her.

She raises an eyebrow at him, her lips twitching as she fights off a smile. "You're kidding me, right? Can't I just _say to you_ , 'My ankle hurts'? Not like we're surrounded by Korean speakers here, Taemin. I think we're safe to speak to each other without pretending we're spies."

He laughs at himself. Somehow, with everything _else_ going on, he'd forgotten that they weren't back home. "Can't we pretend? We're getting really good at it."

"You're an idiot," she says, shaking her head. "I can't believe—"

He kisses her again to shut her up, squarely on the mouth this time. She slips her hands over his, balled into fists in his lap. He relaxes them, stretching his fingers to reach for hers just as the kiss ends. She's got that look on her face again, the one from yesterday. Her pink cheeks, her bright eyes—she looks… in love.

She clears her throat after a moment. "Stay still," she says, her voice low and strange. She licks her thumb and wipes at the corner of his mouth. "You've got lipstick everywhere."

He freezes for a moment, and then softens. "What would I do without you?"

"Walk around the rest of the night looking like the Joker?"

"Fuck you!" he laughs, wiping at his mouth with the back of his hand. 

"It's really not your color," she continues, giggling a little.

"You two sound as though you're up to no good."

Taemin looks up at Benjamin's approach. He's got two fresh glasses of champagne and he sets them down in front of Taemin to swap out their empty glasses.

"Jongin, love, I need to borrow you. David's looking for you. He'd like a quick word."

Jongin pales a little. "I'm sure he does."

"Get it over with, yeah?" Benjamin says, pushing the champagne closer to her. She downs it in one quick swallow and turns to Taemin.

"I'm sorry, I'm leaving you again. Will you be okay here all by yourself?"

"Will _you_ be okay? You look like you're going to be sick."

"That'd certainly improve David's impression of me," she says. "I'll be back." Then, in English, to Benjamin: "Where is he—?"

"Over there," Benjamin says, gesturing with two fingers. "Shall I come with?"

"Yes, please," she says. "If he kills me, it will be good to have a witness."

"Stop that. He's not going to kill you, for christ's sake. You _are_ dramatic," Benjamin says, offering his arm. She accepts it.

Taemin nurses his champagne and watches her speaking to a short, stout man in a jacket made of wine-colored velvet. He's imposing despite his short stature and he seems to be chastising her. Benjamin interjects and the man silences him with a wave. Jongin smiles tightly and nods, then bows her head, still nodding, listening, her hands folded behind her back. When the man seems to be finished, she looks up again, her eyes dull when she accepts a kiss on her cheek from him.

She stands there a few moments longer. The man's speaking to Benjamin now, ignoring Jongin completely. She retreats back to Taemin, looking shaken.

"What was that all about?" Taemin asks, rising to meet her. He offers her the rest of his champagne. She drinks it, her hand trembling ever so slightly when she moves to set the empty glass on the table.

"David Ogelthorpe is the director here. He wasn't happy with me for leaving so suddenly—and getting married without telling him first. He wanted to make sure I was committed to him, because he's got a big season planned for next year, and he says I'm a huge part of that." Her mouth pinches shut. She looks like she's going to cry.

"Are you okay?" Taemin asks, knowing full well that she's not.

"Yeah, I… uh. Can we go somewhere private and talk for a moment? I don't want to cry in front of everyone and I think I'm going to."

"Don't cry, you baby," he says automatically, his hand falling to the small of her back, and then immediately follows it up with, "Yes, of course, sorry. Shit, I'm—terrible at this. Anything you need. Lead the way."

 

She takes him through a long hallway that winds along the back edge of the theatre. He dimly recognizes it—he's waited backstage for her on enough occasions that the thick red carpet and the wood paneling is something verging on familiar. She tests a few doors to dressing rooms—all locked—and drums her fist against the last one in frustration when she finds that it, too, is locked.

"Dammit," she says, leaning back against the wall. Her face starts to crumple.

"Jongin?" Taemin steps closer to her, a hand on her hip. She purses her lips and looks up at him with watery eyes.

"How am I supposed to go back in there and tell him that I'm probably going to have to sit next season out? I'm terrified that means I'm going to lose my spot. Or—what if it takes longer than a season to heal? They'll forget about me. What if—"

"Easy," he says. She's working herself up into a panic attack. "One thing at a time. It's going to be fine, I promise. This is a conversation you have to have with him now. The director, and Benjamin—they need to know what's going on with your ankle."

"Not tonight, I said I didn't want—"

"I know. But we leave for Seoul tomorrow afternoon, and that's not much time. I can stay longer—if we need to extend our trip so you can deal with this properly, that's fine. I'm happy to stay here and be your husband, whatever you need. This isn't as simple as either of us thought it would be, and you can't hide it from them anymore. If he's planning a season with you in mind, you can't drop out last-minute or it'll reflect poorly on you. You're better than that. But no matter what happens, everyone knows you're the best out there, Jongin. Anyone who replaces you won't be as good. And I'll be here to remind you of that every day, if I have to, until you believe that."

She blinks up at him, her eyes wide like she's realizing something. Taemin knows he sounds ridiculous. He never should have agreed to pretend to be her husband because it's too easy, and now he knows what he's never going to have, and it aches so deeply.

"Taemin—"

"Look, I don't—I know I'm being cheesy, it's—I don't know, too much champagne, or jetlag," he says, and then almost through the power of suggestion—or maybe just the power of _Veuve Clicquot_ —he starts to feel slightly dizzy. He presses on: "I just want you to be happy." And it's true. Everything else could change, but this fact will remain constant, forever and always.

She closes her eyes and takes a deep breath. "I have something I need to tell you but I don't know how to say it."

"Try," he says, his throat suddenly sandpaper-dry. He knows her. He knows what this is. The look she's been giving him the past few days, the quiet intimacy between them has changed into—something else, something bigger. But he's a coward. He wants her to say it first so it's her idea.

Cautiously, she moves her hands until they're cradling the nape of his neck, their foreheads resting together. The way she looks at him with that dark stare of hers, like he's the only person in the room—it's always been something Jongin's been capable of, the focus of her attention so direct and so intense that everyone else just fades away into the periphery.

"I can't tell… I don't know what this is." She kisses his cheek on the way to whispering in his ear. Her mouth is so soft it makes Taemin's ribs ache. He focuses on the pressure of her fingertips against his shoulders and tries not to jump the gun and kiss her before she has the chance to speak. "Whatever we're doing… I don't think… I don't think I'm pretending anymore." 

Taemin swallows hard, and he wants to say something like _me, neither_ and he feels like maybe _this_ is the point in the conversation where he should kiss her, but they're interrupted by the sound of someone conspicuously clearing their throat at the end of the hall. They spring apart, inexplicably guilty. _This is normal, we're supposed to be newlyweds—_ Taemin chastises himself, turning his face away while his blush fades anyway.

Jongin fixes her hair and composes her face into a shy smile. "Benjamin."

"Hello, darling. Sorry to intrude on the moment—David's asking for you again."

"I'll be right in."

Benjamin flashes a cheeky grin in Taemin's direction, who can feel the heat rising from his face, the tips of his ears. "Right. I'll go vamp for you. Don't be long, love."

Jongin looks back at Taemin, full of regret. "Taemin, I—"

"Go on," he says, stunned that his voice doesn't crack. "Your public awaits."

She gives him a look: annoyed, but soft. He smiles at her. "Come on, love," he says, trying on his best British accent to mimic Benjamin. It's terrible and he knows it, but it gets her to laugh. 

"We should talk later," she says, and he doesn't miss the way she looks at his mouth.

"Yeah," he says, a shiver of anticipation dancing up his spine, knowing that they're on the brink of something huge, a breakthrough in—what did Jongin call it?—whatever this is between them. "Later."

 

—

 

Later comes—much, much later, nearly midnight, by the time they're able to slip out the back to the car Benjamin called for them. Jongin dozes on his shoulder, her fingers laced with his, the whole tangle cradled protectively in her lap. He has to wake her when they arrive and digs around her tiny golden clutch purse for her wallet before he realizes Benjamin took care of it. 

"You look very handsome in that suit," she tells him on their way up to her flat, her eyes closed. "I forgot to tell you earlier."

"I know. I saw you checking me out."

She scoffs and swats in his direction. She's lethargic with drink and misses his chest completely. 

"I think I caught Benjamin, too."

"Oh, shut up, you're not his type."

"Now, that's a lie. I'm _everyone's_ type."

She cracks open an eye at this. "Have you always been this full of yourself?"

He grins. "Is it still considered arrogant if it's true?"

"Yes."

"Well. You knew what you were getting into." His heart climbs into his throat when the door closes behind them, because—they were about to talk about this, about what's going on between them. No more jokes. 

She kicks off her shoes and doesn't spare him a second glance on her way to the bathroom. Maybe—maybe she'd been a little drunk earlier, saying things out loud she'd meant to keep to herself. He doesn't know—is it his turn to bring it up now? Is she trying to get _him_ to say it first—?

He leans against the counter in the kitchen, hands around a glass of water he poured from the pitcher in the fridge. It's a bad time for this, he reasons, when she's in the middle of dealing with her ankle. They aren't going anywhere. If this has turned into something real—there's no rush. Maybe when they're back in Seoul and she's had the surgery. Physical therapy's going to take a while, so maybe then, when her mind isn't so focused on the pain—

He startles when a pair of arms snake around his waist. Water sloshes everywhere, all down his forearms and the tabletop. Jongin laughs, her face warm through the cotton of his shirt when she leans against his back.

"Idiot," she says. "Didn't you hear me come in?"

"No," he says, mopping at himself with a woven placemat. "You snuck up on me on purpose, you brat."

She steps away and turns off the kitchen light, leaving them bathed in the fuzzy yellow glow over the overhead lamp. He turns. Her hair is down now, messy, framing her face. She's in an oversized shirt—one of his from back in Seoul. Her legs are bare. He takes her face in her hands and kisses her so gently he barely feels their lips touch before he retreats.

Her hands are heavy on his belt. He swallows noisily, watching her slip the buckle open to unbutton his trousers. He steps out of them when they drop to his ankles, leaving him in his dress shirt and boxer briefs.

"Come to bed," she says quietly. "With me."

He nearly chokes on his tongue, which gets her to laugh and breaks the weird, serious mood between them. She leads him by the hand into her dark bedroom and kisses him again at the threshold, unbuttoning his shirt one fumbling placket at a time. He shrugs out of it and drops it on the floor at his feet. 

She takes a step backwards towards the bed and he follows. He's letting her lead, letting her take control of what's happening. His hands shake, but she seems sure: grabbing a fistful of his undershirt and pulling him down on the bed after her. He winces, trying not to hurt her—the bed's small, and nerves are messing with his coordination.

"You okay?" he asks softly, barely able to make out her face in the dark.

She kisses him, giving him an answer and asking another question all at once. It's so easy to fall into a rhythm with her—a second, a third, a lazy fourth, his mouth opening a fraction—and for once he doesn't try to analyze it, his brain too foggy to catch up with what they're doing. They've had a lot of practice the past 24 hours, and it's just effortless, it's good, it's _fun_ —and he loves that he's discovering just how much she smiles when she's kissing him, like she's enjoying this as much as he is. _It's real for the weekend._

"How's your ankle?" he asks in between kisses. She bursts out laughing and slaps his chest.

"Shut up."

His eyes have adjusted to the darkness surrounding them. He can see her perfectly now. He lifts his eyebrows, teasing her. "Make me."

She pushes herself up into him a little, rolling them over so she's on top of him, knees on either side of his thighs, balancing her hip against his open palm to stop from falling off the edge of the bed and onto the floor. He closes his eyes, focusing on the heat of her breath against his mouth before she kisses him again. He's startled by the abrupt flash of tongue against his lower lip, the quietly content moan in back of her throat.

Maybe she makes the first move, or maybe it's just obvious that this is affecting him more than he'd intended, but she moves again, sliding further into his lap right where he's sure she can feel his erection rock hard between her legs. He scrunches his eyes tighter, trying not to draw attention to it.

Her breathing gets heavier. The rocking, steady rhythm of her hips shifting feels deliberate now. He sneaks a glance down to where their bodies are rutting together—the crotch of his briefs, tented, meeting the soft cotton underwear she's wearing to bed, again and again, like waves cresting onto the shore. Cautiously, he slides a hand up the back of her oversized shirt— _his_ shirt—the small of her back warm and smooth under his palm, and then, when she doesn't object, up, to the swell of her breast and the stiff peak of her nipple. He caresses it with the pad of his thumb, feeling her whole body shake between his palms. 

The simulated act of sex, the slow roll of his hips upward, timed just right to meet her—it's driving him crazy, but the restraint is somehow even more of a turn-on. She moves again, her body pressed tightly against his erection now, straddling it. He allows himself a small indulgence and pushes his other hand down the back of her underwear to grope her bare ass.

She giggles into his mouth. "That was predictable."

"Shut up," he says, mimicking her, pulling her closer still, letting her use his body as she bucks and shudders and sighs into his mouth, finally satisfied.

They lie there for a moment, Taemin so out of breath he feels like he just sprinted a marathon, his cock still hard and constricted by his underwear, her body on top of his. He slowly draws his hands away from her ass, back to her waist. Neutral territory. He hasn't opened his eyes yet. He has no idea what he's going to see when he does—keeps imagining the look on Jongin's face, rapidly cycling through a number of emotions, all of them probably tinged with regret. 

"You fell asleep on me?" she says softly after an extended silence. She puts her hand on his cheek, kisses him again. He opens his eyes. She's grinning at him and she giggles nervously when he smiles back.

"I, uh. You okay?" he asks.

"Yeah," she says, clearing her throat, "thanks," like he'd helped her out with opening a jar, or something. 

If Jongin's uncomfortable at the line they just crossed, she doesn't show it. She kisses the tip of his nose, then his mouth twice, the gesture stripped of the urgency she'd had minutes before. It's almost sweet, now.

He closes his eyes again. She's being casual about what just happened between them, so he's going to follow her lead and not make a big deal out of it. Even if he's realizing that this thing between them—it's getting so far beyond past the point of pretending. He doesn't want to pretend anymore, not when he knows pretending means there's a time limit. He touches her face, not needing to open his eyes to trace the bowed curve of her lips, so familiar with her face that his fingertips know her, too. 

"Give me a minute?" she whispers. He opens his eyes.

"Yeah, yeah, sure," he says. She sits up a little, still straddling his lap, and takes great care to climb off the bed without kneeing him in the dick on her way down. He lies back and breathes through his nose, listening to her run the tap in the bathroom. Sounds like she's brushing her teeth. 

From somewhere in the kitchen, he hears the faint sound of his phone ringing. He pinches his nose and forces himself up to get it, still in the pocket of his trousers, still in a heap in the kitchen. He hangs them over the back of the sofa on his way back into Jongin's room. She's still in the bathroom.

"Hey," he says, answering the call before it's diverted to voicemail. It's Jonghyun. "Hyung. What's up?" He glances at the clock on the bedside table and does some quick math in his head. It's after 10 in the morning in Seoul. Jonghyun's insomnia being what it is, he's probably been up for four or five hours already.

"Is Jongin there with you right now?" Jonghyun cuts in, bypassing any sort of greeting again. Taemin glances up at the glow under the bathroom door. The water stops.

"She's—sort of, she's in the other room. She says hi, by the way—"

"Taemin, there's—there's no easy way to say this. There's a really ugly story circulating the internet. It just broke, and I know it's late there, so I wasn't sure if you already knew—"

"What? What kind of story?" Taemin asks, suddenly on high alert. "Is it Ivy again?"

"No, it's—it's you."

" _Me_? What could anyone possibly—"

"You and Jongin. There are—some pictures," Jonghyun says awkwardly. "Of Jongin leaving the hospital a few days ago. Did she know she was being followed? Did she have any idea?"

Taemin closes his eyes. _Fuck. They know._ "Look, hyung—"

"Taemin, the things they're saying—I know it's not true. I can't even say it. I'm sending it to your email, and I'm calling in the lawyer. We'll deal with this when you guys get back. Tomorrow, right?" 

"Yeah, tomorrow," Taemin affirms. The bathroom door opens. Jongin's hair is tied back and slung over her shoulder. She's got a tiny, instantly recognizable foil square in her hand. He closes his eyes. It's all over. "Let me see what they're saying and I'll get back to you, hyung."

Jongin's face changes, her brow furrowed in confusion. "Jonghyun?" she mouths. Taemin holds a finger up.

"Taemin, you'd tell me if something was wrong, wouldn't you? Is Jongin hurt?"

"I'll call you back," Taemin says, and hangs up the call. Jongin's standing in the doorframe, her arms wrapped around herself in a tight hug. She's stripped of the swagger she had moments before, and she looks insecure, now.

"You look upset. What happened?"

"Come here," he says hoarsely, patting the bed next to him. "Sit down."

"Taemin?"

He waits for Jonghyun's email to finish loading. It's—that malicious eyesoftruth account again, featuring screenshots of a series of photographs of Jongin in a wheelchair and her stupid black boot almost peeking out of the blanket across her lap.

He hands her his phone. She scrolls slowly, her lower lip trembling as she reads the comments underneath the picture. The condom in her hand falls to the floor and disappears under the bed. He slides closer to her and puts his hand on her knee.

It's worse than they ever could have imagined. The pictures, surprisingly, are the least incriminating part of it, but because they were taken from such a long distance, and because Jongin's got a blanket on her lap for the entire series, until she disappears around the other side of her mother's car, it's very hard to make out what's happening with her ankle.

The grainy, pixellated photographs leave room for speculation, and each theory's more disgusting than the one before it. _Kim Jongin has visited the hospital a dozen times since arriving back in Seoul for her wedding to her childhood sweetheart Lee Taemin. Her husband has been absent for these visits, placing his career over his superstar wife's well-being._ A few comments underneath the caption, an anonymous user speculates that he must be jealous of her career and her fame. _I wonder if she was pregnant and he forced her to have an abortion. She's the moneymaker in that relationship, how humiliating for him as a man!!! I wonder if he put his hands on her. She's crying in these pictures. What a cold guy!!! A real bastard!!!!!!_

He throws the phone across the room. She cries. He knew she would cry, but it still throws him off guard, watching her crumple in on herself, tucking her knees to her chest like a little girl.

"How could they say those things?" she sobs. "This is libel!"

"Jonghyun's getting SE's lawyer to take it down. He's handling it."

"It's too late. It's out there now," she says, wiping her eyes with the corner of her shirt—his shirt. "It'll never go away. What do we do now?"

"You have to come clean about your ankle. And I think you should stay here," Taemin says. "You don't need to be in Seoul to release a statement about your ankle. If they've been following you to your appointments—I don't want them to harass you. You're safer here where you can rest."

"What about you? What about us?"

He smiles and squeezes her hand. "This was the deal, right? Now that they know about your ankle, there's no reason for us to stay together anymore." He pretends not to notice the wounded look on her face, pretends that it doesn't hurt him to say that mere hours after this thing between them had almost become real.

"I can't believe you're going back to face this alone."

"I have to go back. And the news moves so quickly, they'll forget about it."

"They won't, Taemin. This is a huge scandal, even if we prove it was libel. I still concealed my injury, and you and I are going to announce our marriage is over—it looks bad, even if we know it's not," she says, rising to look for a pair of leggings.

"I'm not a public figure. Nobody's interested in what I do. They will forget about this," he assures her, knowing that she's right and it's not going to be that easy, but he can't allow her to be upset over something beyond her control. He sighs. "It's 1:30AM in London, 10:30 in Seoul. What do we do now?" Tonight was—magical—and now it's over, their fleeting desire pushed aside for crisis management. 

"I should call Benjamin," she says faintly. "I can't put it off any longer, and he really should hear it from me. And you?"

"I'll start packing," Taemin says, shrugging back into the shirt he'd discarded earlier.

 

—

 

She's still crying when Benjamin arrives an hour later. He brushes past Taemin without so much as a word, which is how Taemin knows that he's furious. They're in her bedroom with the door closed, yelling at each other for so long that the sky is noticeably lighter when the door flings open and Benjamin emerges, his mouth in a tight, angry line. He slams the door on his way out of the flat.

Taemin waits for Jongin to come out. He's got to meet the taxi for the airport soon—but he can't leave without saying goodbye to Jongin first. His bag is packed and by the door, and he's in his suit from last night.

He hears the car honk outside and his phone rings. "Be right down," he says brusquely, pocketing his phone, and then goes to Jongin. She's in a heap on her bed, completely shrouded by a blanket. He tugs at it a little, hearing her breathy little sobs underneath it.

"Jongin," he says quietly. "Jongin, I have to go."

She glances up at him, sniffling. Her face is terribly swollen from all of the crying. He can barely make out the beautiful brown of her eyes. "Benjamin—he's going to take care of it. He's calling Ogelthorpe now, and—they're going to get me into a doctor today."

Taemin nods. 

"This was not how I wanted him to find out," she says, her face crumpling. "I really messed up, Taemin. He's—I think he's going to drop me as a client."

"He won't do that. Give him time." Taemin kneels on the floor in front of her so he can look her in the eye, his chin denting the mattress just a little. The weird tension between them is all but forgotten like this. She's his best friend, his oldest friend. Protecting her has always been his priority, since Day One, and this charade hasn't changed that at all. "You felt like you weren't given a choice."

"He doesn't see it that way."

Downstairs, the taxi honks again, a trio of quick, impatient beeps. She closes her eyes, and his thumb manages to catch the slow tear leaking down her nose before it drips onto the sheets.

"Don't miss your flight," she says.

"I won't," he says quietly, sitting at the edge of the bed. "But first, come here a sec."

She crawls up into his lap and hugs his waist. He can feel her shivering. It feels inappropriate to kiss her the way he kissed her last night, so he wraps the blanket around her shoulders instead and tucks her into bed. He settles for combing back her tousled hair from her face and kisses her hairline tenderly, feeling dangerously close to tears himself. She grips onto his wrist like she doesn't want to let go, and then suddenly she does.

"I'm sorry," he whispers. "This was supposed to give you a break and it only made everything worse."

Her face changes. Eyes shut. She's trying so hard not to cry again but a fresh wave of tears escapes down her cheek anyway. "Taemin, I—" 

"I'll fix it," he says. "Don't speak to the press, don't take any calls. Change your number if you have to. Let me handle it. You just focus on getting your ankle taken care of."

She nods miserably, on the brink of blubbering. 

"I'll call when I land," he says. "I'll check on you."

"Okay," she says.

"You want me to call your parents?" he asks.

"No. I'll do it," she says quietly. "Thanks, Taemin. I—you've been—I just—so great—I'm sorry it ended up like this."

"I'm the best friend, remember?" he says, even though the words feel strange to him now, heavy and _wrong_ on his tongue. Inadequate.

"Sure," she says, rolling over to face the wall so she doesn't have to watch him leave. "Yeah. Have a safe flight."

 

He doesn't remember the cab ride to Heathrow. Doesn't remember standing in line for security, barely remembers slumping in his seat with his bag still in his lap. Just looks at his reflection staring back at him from the window, the insulated life he'd built with Jongin over the past month slipping away, back to reality, back to… nothing, absolutely nothing at all.


	11. Chapter 11

He spends the entire trip home cursing the in-flight wifi, unable to get any work done _or_ keep in contact with anyone. He makes up his mind to get on a plane again in the next 48 hours, to go back to London, back to Jongin. He doesn't want her to be alone through this next stage, but he's also kicking himself for walking away right now. There's something happening between them that they need to figure out and it's got him feeling queasy and gripping the armrests every time he thinks about it, rolling waves of homesickness, just knowing that she isn't beside him right now, coming home with him, where she belongs. _She belongs._

By the time he lands at Incheon and gets his phone switched back on, he sees a text from Jonghyun assuring him that the Instagram posts about Jongin have been removed and to apologize to Jongin—thank god for Jonghyun and SE's legal team—but it's too late. The damage is done and the story is out there. There's nothing stopping netizens from running with it, now.

He fires off a few texts to Jongin to let her know, not expecting her to reply since it's after midnight in London now. He's faintly disappointed to discover that she hasn't texted _him_ all day while he was trapped up in the air with no signal—no updates, nothing. Maybe she took his advice and changed her number already. Maybe she's just sleeping. Maybe there's nothing to report yet.

Baekhyun's waiting for him on the other side of Customs. Taemin had all but forgotten that he was supposed to be meeting them both. "Where is Jongin? What the hell is going on, Taemin?" Baekhyun demands, skipping past _Hi_ and _How was the flight?_. He's angry. He's barely got an indoor voice when he's on his best behavior but it's uncomfortably loud now, even in the ringing cacophony of the busy terminal. Over Baekhyun's shoulder, Taemin locks eyes with a teenager who has her phone up and pointed in their direction. _Is she taking a picture? A video? Is she one of Jongin's fans?_

He rubs his face and turns away, feeling stupid and paranoid.

"Not here," he says, his voice muffled by his hands. "Where are you parked?"

 

As he stuffs Taemin's bag into the trunk and slams it with far more force than is necessary, Baekhyun's annoyance is palpable. He slams the car door, too, and doesn't wait for Taemin to buckle up before he pulls out of his parking spot. Taemin can't quite figure out _why_ Baekhyun's so angry, unless it's some misplaced sense of concern for Jongin. He'd been there through Ivy's ordeal a mere week ago; there's no way he believes the rumors, especially considering the source.

"We're not in public now," Baekhyun says quietly after he's pulled out of the short-term parking lot and paid the parking fee. His window's still open a crack from where he'd rolled it down to hand cash over to the attendant and the wind makes a harsh, whipping noise accelerating in time with the car's speed. "You mind telling me what happened?"

"She uh, got injured. Pretty badly. Tore a ligament in her ankle."

"When?" Baekhyun asks, looking aghast. He takes his eyes off the road long enough to give Taemin a wide-eyed, horrified stare. "Was it—when she missed the showcase?"

Taemin takes a deep breath. He didn't want to go against Jongin's wishes, but he couldn't see a way out of this conversation. "No, earlier. Back in April."

"April?" Baekhyun says slowly, counting back the weeks in his head. "I don't understand. She seemed fine at your wedding."

There's a brief moment where Taemin wants to confess everything, all of it, the fact that they were never married and were just playing along to distract everyone from noticing her pain. The plan had worked, after all. It's not his place to tell all of her secrets. Their secrets. 

"She wasn't," he says finally. "She wore a brace. She had a round of PRP done the Monday right after."

"What the _fuck_ , Taemin. Why didn't you tell anyone? Why didn't _she_? We could have done something, I don't know—"

"What would you have done? What could you have possibly done that her doctors weren't doing for her? She didn't want you to know, she didn't want anyone to know. She didn't want the pity."

"Oh, fuck off, that's ridi—" Baekhyun cuts himself off as the realization hits him. "Hold on. Those pictures were taken here, I recognize the hospital. If she was treated in Seoul, she wasn't ever in London any of those times I called and got her voicemail. Every time you said she was out of town—she wasn't, was she?"

Fuck. Taemin closes his eyes. He's just gotten Jongin into deeper shit with Baekhyun without realizing it. "No."

"She was with you the whole time. Ignoring me on purpose. And you were lying for her."

"Yes."

"God, fuck you," Baekhyun says bitterly. "You know, you and I are friends but I know you like your privacy, and I don't push, because I get it, we all work in this business. But we're her friends too, Taemin, we care about her too. She—I just never thought she'd lie to me. To _me_."

Another pang of guilt. "Don't be mad at her, Baekhyun—she was devastated, and she asked me not to tell. You didn't see how upset she was—"

"Of course I didn't, because I didn't know. You guys are so fucking—you know, whatever, I should have figured this was a possibility because it's always the Jongin and Taemin show whenever the two of you are in a room, and nobody else fucking matters, I guess, not even your friends." He makes a disgusted noise. "You two really are made for each other."

"Calm down," Taemin says. "You're pissed because she wasn't ready to tell any of her friends that her career they're always praising might be over?"

"I'm pissed because you dragged all of us into this stupid lie and didn't respect us enough to give us any warning." He pauses. "You haven't even seen the worst of it yet."

"There's worse?" Taemin thinks, wondering if someone's figured out Jongin's name hasn't been added to his family registry. "What kind of worse?"

"Check Naver, check Pann, check wherever you want. It's everywhere."

Taemin unlocks his phone screen and tabs over to his web browser. There it is. Worse, somehow, than he could have possibly expected, with hundreds of comments— _SCANDAL-PLAGUED SE'S CEO KIM JONGHYUN—IS HE LOSING HIS TOUCH?_ — this story strikes right to the heart of Jonghyun's fears. He's been on the brink of a meltdown since April, and this—he shouldn't have to worry about drama from Taemin's personal life ruining the company's image, either.

When he dares to check the stories about him and Jongin and those cursed pictures, there are half a dozen posts anywhere he chooses to look, all of them deeply unflattering and full of half-truths and speculation. Some of it verges into libel, quoting anonymous sources that quite simply do not exist, _could not_ exist, saying things like he must have pushed her, he did it intentionally, he put his hands on her. In short: it's a fucking mess. He can't see a way to unravel this one. They'd never anticipated this could blow up in their faces quite so spectacularly as it has.

"You know Jonghyun-hyung better than most people," Baekhyun says quietly after a while, so quiet you almost can't hear him over the air conditioner. "He's been under a lot of pressure lately. You _know that_. So I just can't believe you're letting him clean up your mess without telling him what's going on. He deserves better than that, Taemin. He's the reason you have a career at all."

"I know. I was just on a plane for fourteen hours, Baekhyun—what was I supposed to do up there—?"

"This whole keeping-it-a-secret thing… was it your idea? Because it doesn't sound like something Jongin would have come up with on her own."

That accusation stings a little. "Baekhyun, as much as you'd like to believe you're the center of everyone's universe, there are some things that just aren't your business," Taemin snaps, wishing he could take it back the minute he says it because he knows it's just gotten him into deeper shit with Baekhyun. "Sure, whatever you want, it's my fault, all of it. Jongin's injury, Jonghyun's bad press, I fucked up, okay? I caused this to happen. Is that what you wanted me to say?"

Baekhyun, wisely, says nothing further, and so Taemin endures the rest of their drive back to the SE building in painful, awkward silence.

 

There's a herd of reporters waiting around the front of the SE building when they round the corner. Taemin slides down in his seat, unused to being the one trying to hide from the press. Baekhyun barely spares him a glance.

"They're not here for you," he says flatly, pulling into the underground garage for employees as the reporters clamor behind them on the sidewalk. "They're waiting for Jonghyun."

Taemin only sits up sheepishly when they're pulled into Baekhyun's reserved spot. He's still got his baseball cap pulled low over his eyes and he doesn't dare look over to see the expression on Baekhyun's face. "Look, Baekhyun—"

"If you're going to thank me for the ride, you're welcome. For anything else, I really don't want to hear it right now."

Taemin nods and gets out to gather his things from the trunk. Baekhyun doesn't pause at all, just strides on through the door to the stairs, not bothering to wait for Taemin. Which, Taemin supposes, is probably for the best. 

 

—

 

He's already late to rehearsal, but he takes a detour to his office first, to drop off his things, and then goes up to Jonghyun's office. The door's closed. He knocks, so tentatively he's not even sure it was heard, but Jonghyun's voice calls out just as Taemin's about to walk away.

"Was that a knock? Come in."

Taemin sucks in a deep breath and pushes the door open. Jonghyun's sitting in the dark on his couch, the window shades drawn and a couple candles burning. He's got a tablet in his lap but the screen's dark. Quiet instrumental music is playing over the speakers nestled in the plant pots near the dark windows, the gentle, resonant hum of it making the office seem cozy and relaxed; an oasis in the middle of all of the chaos outside.

"Hyung," Taemin says softly. "Hyung, I'm so fucking sorry—"

Jonghyun jumps to his feet and hugs Taemin, which startles him—he was expecting another lecture, another Baekhyun—something, some sort of angry response. He'd certainly deserve it. He wasn't expecting a warm embrace from the one person he'd never intended to drag so deeply into this mess. 

"Are you okay? Is Jongin okay? Did she come back with you?"

"I—yes, she stayed—" Taemin says vaguely, not sure which question to answer first. Jonghyun ushers him onto the couch and shuts the door behind them. 

"What happened?"

"Hyung, the articles—I'm so sorry, I didn't think there'd be backlash on you for this or I never would have—"

"Taemin, we can talk about me in a minute. I need to know Jongin's okay first."

"She—well, I mean, no, she's not. She will be—"

"Start at the beginning. What were those pictures? Why was she at the hospital?"

"Hyung!" Taemin huffs, a little impatient with Jonghyun's blustering interrogation style. "Are you going to let me answer any of your questions?"

Jonghyun mimes zipping his mouth shut and gestures with a flat palm for Taemin to continue, but suddenly he doesn't really know what to say. If anyone should know the whole story, it's Jonghyun, and yet—

"She got hurt back in April, during a performance. So when she came back to Seoul, it wasn't just to get married, it was—so she could deal with the injury and take some time off to heal. Those pictures—she was at the hospital for PRP injections, and the treatment… hasn't worked the way she was hoping. She has to have surgery. Soon."

Jonghyun sighs. He's rubbing his knee in slow, methodical circles, looking troubled. "You'll be going back to London right away, then?"

"I—yeah, I have to, hyung, I can't leave her alone for this," Taemin says, his voice cracking a little. He's so tired he might _actually_ cry, and he never cries.

"Okay," Jonghyun says immediately, like he doesn't have to think about it, like he already knew it was coming. "You take all the time you need. You'll always have a job with me no matter what. SE doesn't exist without you."

 

He goes home after that without even bothering to check on Y KNOT's rehearsal. He doesn't want to have to repeat himself or explain what's happening with Jongin to anyone else. That can be tomorrow's circle of hell. 

His apartment's still in a state of disarray from the rushed packing on Thursday morning. He pops the battery out of his phone to avoid any disruptions and naps on the couch for five hours before his bladder rudely wakes him from a dreamless sleep. He tries to doze off again after but it's fruitless: he's awake now.

He's faced with Jongin's things in every corner of his apartment, on every surface. Shoes and shirts and paperback books, half-finished and left face down on his nightstand. Proof she'd really been here, they'd had a life together three days ago. It feels surreal. If he weren't folding the rest of her clothes and tucking them into a duffel bag right now, he almost would have chalked the past two months up to a stress dream. He'd expect to wake up on the couch in his office, still weeks before Y KNOT's debut, and maybe he'd call Jongin and they'd laugh the whole thing off while he told her everything.

He still doesn't have any messages waiting for him when he replaces the battery and turns his phone back on. He tabs through some flights on his phone. His head a little clearer after sleeping, he knows he can't turn _right_ back around. He's got to get his affairs in order—hand over the reins for Y KNOT, find someone to sublet his apartment for the rest of the year, and then he can go back to be with her. He'd ask Baekhyun or Chanyeol to look in on it, but Baekhyun's monumentally pissed and Chanyeol's silence since the pictures surfaced is ominous enough that Taemin doesn't want to risk it.

He buys a flight for the following weekend, back to Jongin. One way. Ready or not.

 

—

 

Everyone's still staring at him when he arrives early at 6 o'clock the next morning. Soojung seems to be the only one unaffected by the breaking news. She barges into his office without knocking with a cup of coffee while he's stretching on the floor and perches on the arm of his couch, her teeth sunk into the plastic lid.

"Welcome back," she says when he glances up and nods hello at her through the hair in his eyes. "Missed you yesterday."

"Yeah, I—jetlag, you know how it is," he grunts, switching legs. His calves burn. He still hasn't heard from Jongin and he's punishing himself by overdoing it. He doesn't usually stretch this thoroughly when he's just running a rehearsal, but it gives him something to focus on, methodically pushing through the tightness in his muscles, one group at a time.

"Nobody here thinks you did the things they're saying," she says. "I hope you know that. We all know how vicious some of these gossip accounts can be, especially when they're not held accountable by belonging to a major publication."

It's the most rational, level-headed response he's received since the news broke. "I know," he says, sitting back and leaning against the back of the couch. It hurts his neck to look up at her so he doesn't bother. "Baekhyun's still pissed at me. He thinks it was my idea and Jongin just went along with it, like anyone's ever been able to get Jongin to do anything she doesn't want to do."

"Baekhyun's a child," she says flatly. "He's only mad because he's a nosy motherfucker who can't stand it when people have secrets they haven't shared with him. Which is stupid, considering how many secrets he's got."

"What is that supposed to mean? What kind of secrets could Baekhyun possibly have? He's so loud I think even the spy satellites know his email password."

"Do I look like a gossip account to you?" she asks, swatting him on the crown of his head. "Mind your own business, you idiot. Which is exactly what I told him yesterday."

There's a knock on the door and Jonghyun enters before he's given permission.

"My door really is pointless, isn't it?" Taemin jokes as Soojung gets to her feet and excuses herself. He smiles up at Jonghyun, hoping it doesn't look as strained as it feels. "Nobody respects my privacy. But I guess we knew that one already, didn't we?"

"I wasn't expecting you here," Jonghyun says, and there's a strange edge to his voice that gets Taemin to wrench his neck up to look at him.

"Hyung? What's wrong?" If the pressure from these articles are getting to him, Taemin will never forgive himself.

"Have you spoken to Jongin today?"

"Not, uh—no, she's been busy," Taemin says, not wanting to tell Jonghyun he hasn't spoken to her _at all_ since he left. "I'm not going back until Saturday. I didn't want to leave you stranded, I'll make sure everything's been taken care of first with Y KNOT—"

"First, I think you should read this." Jonghyun hands Taemin his iPad and sits down next to him. "I didn't think you'd seen it yet, since you're here, it's—you would have told me about this."

It's a press release on Jongin's personal website. She hardly ever issues statements, so this must be it, what she's been preparing while she's been out of touch. Taemin sucks his lower lip between his teeth and reads.

 

> _IN APRIL OF THIS YEAR, I SUSTAINED AN ANKLE INJURY DURING A PERFORMANCE OF DON QUIXOTE. THIS IS MY SECOND INJURY TO THE SAME ANKLE, AND DOCTORS RECOMMENDED PRP AS MY FIRST COURSE OF TREATMENT. EMBARRASSED TO ADMIT THAT I NEEDED TIME TO RECOVER, I TOOK THIS AS AN OPPORTUNITY TO GO HOME AND SPEND TIME WITH THE PEOPLE I LOVE. I APOLOGIZE TO MY FANS THAT I CONCEALED THIS FACT FROM THEM. I HAVE ONLY EVER WANTED TO SHOW THE BEST IMAGE OF MYSELF, AND OMITTING THE FULL STORY WAS A COWARDLY DECISION. I SINCERELY APOLOGIZE FOR THIS. I WILL WORK HARDER AND COME BACK STRONGER TO EARN THE PRIDE AND SUPPORT OF KIM JONGIN, NATION'S FAIRY ONCE AGAIN._
> 
> _LEE TAEMIN IS MY BEST FRIEND SINCE WE WERE CHILDREN. HE HAS NEVER BEEN ANYTHING BUT LOVING AND SUPPORTIVE AND IT HURTS MY HEART TO SEE SUCH LIBELOUS ACCUSATIONS LEVELED AGAINST HIM. I WILL BE PURSUING LEGAL ACTION AGAINST THESE TABLOIDS. IT IS UNACCEPTABLE THAT THESE STORIES WERE EVER PRINTED. THEY ARE UNEQUIVOCALLY FALSE. I CAN NEVER THANK TAEMIN ENOUGH FOR EVERYTHING._
> 
> _HOWEVER AFTER CAREFUL CONSIDERATION OF OUR SITUATION, DUE TO OUR CAREERS, WE HAVE DECIDED TO SEPARATE TO REDIRECT OUR FOCUS ON DANCE, AND WE REQUEST PRIVACY AT THIS DIFFICULT TIME. WE WILL NOT BE ANSWERING ANY FURTHER QUESTIONS ON THE SUBJECT. PLEASE RESPECT OUR WISHES._

 

Taemin's heart sinks like a stone. Even though he knew it was coming, it still feels like all the oxygen suddenly left the room. At least he can be sure his reaction seems like genuine heartbreak to Jonghyun. "I didn't know," he says faintly, getting to his feet. He needs—to not be here right now, he needs to go outside to get some fresh air or something. "I actually haven't—I haven't heard from her since I got back from London, she, uh, changed her number—"

"Oh, Taemin," Jonghyun says, his eyes soft with sympathy, looking like he wants to cry, which would annoy Taemin if he didn't know Jonghyun well enough to know everything Jonghyun ever felt, ever expressed, was completely, genuinely sincere. "Do you want me to call her manager? Maybe she'll talk to me—"

"Don't. Give her some space," Taemin says, rubbing the back of his neck and turning away. The next thing he knows, Jonghyun's up too and hugging him from behind like they're in some fucking drama.

"I'm so sorry, Taemin. I know how much you two care about each other. Just because it's not working now doesn't mean it won't ever work. I'm not giving up on either of you yet. You'll get there."

Taemin stands there and holds the weight of Jonghyun draped on his shoulders. He doesn't know what to say to that. _We weren't ever there in the first place._ He opens his mouth anyway to retort back, or make fun of Jonghyun for being so melodramatic, but the words don't come to him the way they usually do so he just stands there, grateful and confused and unexpectedly—strangely sad.

—

 

The tabloid articles that spring up in the week after Jongin's press release are even worse, or maybe they're just hitting Taemin harder because he feels like he's alone in this now even if she's back to being a phone call away. He punishes himself by reading hit piece after hit piece about the dissolution of the short-lived marriage. Most of them blame Taemin, calling him manipulative and a dictator. There's one that comes very close to accusing him of breaking her ankle in a fit of jealousy over her career, worded just carefully enough to avoid a lawsuit. Still, he'd rather read a thousand like that than the one he finds which blames Jongin for everything—accusing them of fighting in public, speculating that she slept with Jonghyun and her manager, accusing her of disrespecting Taemin's work at SE and dismissing it as a waste of time.

Nobody seems to have noticed that the whole thing was a farce to begin with, although Taemin hadn't thought it would be this much of a scandal.He thought they would be able to separate quietly. A failed marriage is a disappointment; for the public to discover it was a lie all along _now_ would be truly unforgivable. They'd never come back from that. At least now Jongin's got a chance, now that she's no longer burdened by Taemin's baggage and getting most of the sympathy in the press, both in South Korea and abroad.

He cancels his plane ticket to London and throws himself back into rehearsals because they're the best distraction he's got right now. There's always something to critique, something to drill again. The members are downright miserable with his newfound militancy, so much so that they don't even bother to lower their voices when they complain about him, but he doesn't care. He can be the bad guy here, too.

After eight days of painful silence, he gets a text from an unknown number right before bed and nearly deletes it before he sees the message, a single sad face emoji. It seems too coincidental.

_jongin?_ he types out. Hits send. Waits.

_sorry, couldn't call before now. benjamin is watching me like a hawk. lot of dr appts. my surgery is next week. i wish you could be here._ she replies after a minute. He saves the number back to his phone and deletes her old number. 

_i didn't know you were going to break up with me in the press_ he replies, and then adds a smiley face after to soften it.

_did i break your heart? or did u break mine_

_both_ he replies. Two more smiley faces, which feels like overkill the minute he hits send but it's too late to take them back. He feels fucking weird. If he didn't know better he'd think he was nervous, but he's known Jongin too long to start being nervous now. _so benjamin hates me too, now?_

_i told him u had a tour to direct. i told him i don't blame u, but he does a little anyway. i'm sry. i didn't want to tell him everything, he was mad enough_

That one bothers him too, somehow. If he'd realized back in April that agreeing to pretend to marry—and subsequently pretend to break up with—Jongin meant that he'd have to pretend to never speak to her again, it might have given him pause. Even if their plan had fully succeeded and she'd made a complete recovery with the PRP, it still would have ended up like this. Knowing then what he knows now, he would have reconsidered, maybe even told Jongin to tell Benjamin straight away and just get the stupid surgery, critics be damned. He hasn't really lost his best friend, she's still there at the other end of the phone replying to his text messages… and yet somehow it feels like he has. They'll never be able to go back to the way it was. People are already taking sides in this imaginary break-up, they won't ever understand it if he and Jongin start spending time together like their friendship hadn't fundamentally changed.

_can i call u?_ he asks. He wants to hear her voice.

_can't talk right now, ben's here :(_ she says. _i have u saved in my phone under sehun btw. in case he looks @ who i've been talking to n sees a korean number_

_what's sehun saved under?_

_i never save her number. just urs_.

That almost makes up for the fact that he's destined to be exiled in secret for the rest of his life. He leans back against the arm of his couch and types away, telling her about Baekhyun's anger, about Jonghyun's sadness—and for a while it almost feels like everything's okay, that this will be fine, that he's happy having at least this much of her if the alternative is nothing at all.

— 

It sucks, though, to realize that the friends you thought you had really belonged to someone else after all. All of the people he'd fallen in with at SE—it's startling to realize that they were Jongin's all along. Even Chanyeol seems wary of him now. He seems less upset than Baekhyun, possibly due to the fact that he knew about Jongin's ankle, but the news of their sudden break-up seems to have shaken everyone, and they're all siding with Jongin—even Soojung. He gets a lot of blank stares when he passes them in the hallway, or crosses paths in between rehearsals. Forget morning meetings—he's stopped showing up to those entirely, just to avoid the uncomfortable way everyone seems to go temporarily deaf every time he speaks.

Jonghyun's the only one who checks in with him anymore. His constant attention is almost worse because it keeps reminding him that if any of this had been real, he would be someone to be pitied. He's certainly _feeling_ pitiful. He's lonely and tired and burned out, and he especially feels like he doesn't belong at SE anymore, even if he'd had a hand in helping Jonghyun build it back up from the post-CEO Shin era. What's the point of going to work every day when everyone in the building thinks you're a fucking fall down mess of a human being?

He's thinking about all of this when Jonghyun swings by his office late on a Friday night, carrying a bottle of whiskey and two glasses. It's Y KNOT's last week promoting _Love War_ and it's been deemed SE's most successful rookie era, which means great things for the group and the company. Jonghyun's considerably more relaxed than he had been a month ago, even if he's going to have to dive headfirst into Violet Flashlight's comeback next week.

"You could go home once in a while," Jonghyun says, pouring them each three fingers of the whiskey and setting the uncapped bottle on Taemin's piano with a decisive thud. "You've earned it."

Taemin grunts and accepts the glass but doesn't drink it, staring past Jonghyun at a fixed point on the wall. He's got to break the news to Jonghyun somehow, but he doesn't know what to say to segue the conversation in that particular direction when Jonghyun's in a mood this bright.

"They really stepped up their performances the past few weeks," Jonghyun says. "All thanks to you. I hear you've been putting them through hell. It paid off." He clinks his glass against Taemin's. "Thank you, as always, for how hard you work. The girls are looking forward to seeing what you've got prepared for them. Eunji hasn't shut up since I told her you'd be directing it. I know it doesn't give you a break after this promotion cycle, but I'd like to start the production meetings next week—"

"Yeah, hyung, I—uh, I don't know about that," Taemin says hoarsely, breaking his gaze away from the eggshell white of his walls to look Jonghyun square in the eyes. Here's his opportunity. As awkward and abrupt as it is, he's just got to rip the bandaid off and do it so he can pack up his desk and move on with his life as quickly as possible, away from these people he used to be friends with, who now hate his guts. "I just—this has been a hard couple of months, and I don't think it's a great idea for me to be working on it when I'm not going to have support—"

"Oh, no, Taemin, don't—don't—it's okay—is this about Baekhyun? I've already spoken to him—"

"It's about everything," Taemin says. "Come on, hyung, I'm not exactly anyone's favorite person right now. Not to mention all the bad press I keep bringing you every time I _breathe_ —" 

"Have you heard from Jongin yet?" Jonghyun asks, the same question he asks every few days. Taemin can't tell him _Yes, actually, just last night, she had her surgery on Wednesday and I wasn't there and I hate myself_ , not without giving him hope that they're trying to work things out, so he just hangs his head to avoid looking at Jonghyun's face. "Taemin, I—maybe it'd be good to have something to keep your mind off things for a while, until she's ready—"

"She's never going to be ready," Taemin says, more abruptly than he'd intended. He looks up. "Just drop it, please. I don't want to talk about that anymore."

"It's dropped, I promise." Jonghyun drains his glass and moves to refill it, which gives Taemin the opportunity to retrieve an envelope from his desk: the resignation letter he'd written this morning, effective immediately. 

"I was going to give this to you earlier, but I didn't want to spoil Y KNOT's promotions by leaving in the middle of them," he says lamely. "I'm sorry, hyung, I just—I can't be here—anymore, not right now, I'm not pulling my weight. You need someone who isn't distracted—someone who can be part of the team."

Jonghyun turns the envelope over with his free hand, squinting at it like he's never seen a letter of resignation before, like no one had ever dared _quit_ on him before. "So this is for my benefit? You came to this conclusion without talking to me first? This is an act of selflessness, Taemin?"

"Hyung," Taemin says softly, almost pleading. If Jonghyun ends up mad at him too, he'll never forgive himself. "I'm so sorry, you know I am. This—is not how I was expecting things to go."

"What will you do, then?" Jonghyun asks, frowning, but his eyes still gentle with concern. "If you're not here, what am I losing you to?"

"I've got my studio, I guess. It's been forever since I was there for any meaningful period of time," Taemin says without really thinking about it, although right now he doesn't even feel much like dancing. "Or maybe I'll just take some time off and travel."

Jonghyun nods and hands the letter back to Taemin. "I don't accept this," he says. "But I do think you need to take some time. I'd be lying if I said I didn't see this coming, and while I'm disappointed… I understand, and I think you should put yourself first for a little while. I told you once, Taemin, and I'll tell you again. There will always be a place for you here at SE. You're the only reason we made it this far."

Taemin sighs. Jonghyun's being so nice to him that it changes his mind: it would be so, so much easier if he got pissed off and scolded Taemin for being irresponsible. It's what he deserves, doing this to Jonghyun. Jonghyun hasn't had a day off in three years and here he is, worrying about _Taemin_ needing a break, for fuck's sake. Jonghyun's handling this so gracefully it's making Taemin feel worse about quitting on him. 

"Hyung, that's not fair to you—you can't just indefinitely hold a spot for me when you need to be thinking about what's best for the company. I don't even know if I'll be back—"

"You will," Jonghyun says, far more confident than Taemin feels. "I know what's best for the company and it's you, Lee Taemin. Always has been. This is in your blood." He clinks his glass against Taemin's again. "To a much-needed vacation. Come on, catch up. If this is your going-away party, you need to be much drunker than you are right now."

Taemin swallows his drink and groans into the back of his hand as he feels the neat burn all the way down to his toes. He doesn't particularly like whiskey, but he'll drink whatever Jonghyun hands him because it's usually expensive enough that Taemin can pretend to enjoy it. Jonghyun beams at him like a proud father and finishes his, too.

"That's more like it," he says, always encouraging, his voice a little hoarse, but he smiles and fills Taemin's glass up once more.

—

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey all, it's been a while. obviously... a lot of shit has happened over the past few months. i hope everyone has been taking care of themselves. it's been weird and sad and i think i speak for a lot of people when i say i miss jonghyun so fucking much. it's been kind of hard to enjoy things without feeling guilty, hence... the delay... with everything. i'm sorry. 
> 
> tbh i struggled with what to do with this fic. it feels strange to write jjong now, and i completely understand if people aren't ready to get back into reading about him, even peripherally. please take care of yourself first. this will always be here if at any time you're ready to come back. if not, that's okay too.
> 
> if anyone needs anything, i had to abandon my writing twitter account for various reasons, but you can come talk to me on my [curiouscat](https://curiouscat.me/heartstops) if you'd like. 
> 
> next chapter will be the last chapter for this fic. it's been a long, long ride. thank you all for sticking with me.


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